It’s the end of the line for annual Windows 10 updates, says Microsoft – Ars Technica

Although Windows 11 was released in October 2021, Windows 10 has received annual “feature updates” since then. Windows 10 21H2 was released around the same time as Windows 11, and Windows 10 22H2 arrived a year later.

But version 22H2 will be the end of the road for Windows 10, according to Roadmap update Posted yesterday. Jason Lesnick, Microsoft Product Manager, confirmed that Windows 10 will continue to receive security updates until the end date of October 2025, but there will be no more annual feature updates for Windows 10.

“As documented in the Windows 10 Enterprise, Education, and Windows 10 Home and Pro lifecycle pages, Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025,” Leznek wrote. The current version, 22H2, will be the final version of Windows 10, and all versions will continue to be supported with monthly security update releases until that date.

In terms of the day-to-day practical impact on people still using Windows 10, this isn’t a huge deal. The company has never published comprehensive release notes for Windows 10 22H2, and it’s clear that most of Microsoft’s efforts have been going into Windows 11 and its built-in apps over the past year and a half. At least some people who are still using Windows 10 do so because they don’t want to deal with the changes, so the end of feature updates isn’t exactly heartbreaking.

The approaching 2025 Update means that computers that don’t meet the Windows 11 system requirements will no longer be able to get officially supported Windows security updates. Most of these systems will be at least seven or eight years old at that point, which is old but not past the point of usefulness for many machines; Users will either need to take their chances by installing an unsupported Windows 11 or an alternative operating system like ChromeOS Flex or some other Linux version.

Leznek also said that the next “LTSC” version of Windows 11 won’t be released until the second half of 2024. LTSC, or Long Term Service Channel, releases receive security updates for longer than other annual Windows releases, and they’re meant to be stable platforms for admins. IT to use them if they don’t want to keep up with the release of new Windows versions every year. Regular consumer versions of Windows are still supposed to see a major update of 23H2 in the second half of this year.