I bet manpower costs are significant as well. How many people are needed to run this thing? You probably need engineers with an esoteric set of skills to put it back together and manage it which would not be cheap.

Edit: I looked it up, it is running SUSE Enterprise Linux, so maybe management isn’t as specialized as I expected.

Never used that tool so I can’t really say :(

I think there are two options personally.

1. The Windows 11 LTSC version just leaked on Chinese forums. I wouldn’t use that ISO but would wait for the official release. Seems like the “best” version of Windows.

2. Use Chris Titus’ WinUtil on a normal install: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil. He has put a lot of effort into this tool and it works great.

If you want to go full try-hard you can do it yourself. Buy NTLite and go to town on stripping stuff out. You’ll probably break something but it is fun to play with.

It could also mean you didn’t pay your phone bill.