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Microsoft To Release Two Major Windows 10 Updates Next Year (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, aka Windows 10 version 1607, released earlier this week, it's time to look forward to what's next. Windows 10 has multiple release tracks to address the needs of its various customer types. The mainstream consumer release, the one that received the Anniversary Update on Tuesday, is dubbed the Current Branch (CB). The Current Branch for Business (CBB) trails the CB by several months, giving it greater time to bed in and receive another few rounds of bug fixing. Currently the CBB is using last year's November Update, version 1511. In about four months, Microsoft plans to bump CBB up to version 1607, putting both CB and CBB on the same major version. [The Long Term Servicing Branch, an Enterprise-only version that will receive security and critical issue support for 10 years, will also be updated.] Going forward, however, the differences between both current branch variants (CB and CBB) and LTSB will become more marked. Microsoft is not planning another major update this year. There will be no equivalent to last year's 1511 release, but Microsoft will have two next year. These are believed to be codenamed Redstone 2 (rs2) and Redstone 3 (rs3), with this week's 1607 release being Redstone 1 (rs1). Current expectation is that rs2 will have a heavy mobile focus and be shipped simultaneously with new Surface branded hardware.
TFA mentions Current Branch and Current Branch for Business, without explaining them too much. I doubt that many folks here are aware of them and the differences, so...
If you're on CB, you get major feature updates (e.g. the Anniversary Edition) pushed to you as soon as it's made generally available. Folks on CBB will still get those updates pushed to them, but a while later (MS says around four months delay), and with all the fixes made in that time.
Now, if you have the Pro or Enterprise editions (sorry Home users, you guys are stuck on CB only), you can quite easily switch between the two by means of checking (or unchecking) the "Defer upgrades" option that's somewhere in the Windows Update options. Want to live on MS's cutting edge? Leave it off. Want to use those Home peasants as your beta testers? Switch it on.
Then, there's the LTSB edition of Enterprise, which is basically RTM that just receives security patches and the like (MS will make newer versions available -- I believe there's a 2016 update to LTSB coming later this year -- but, as far as I'm aware, there's no obligation to upgrade to a newer LTSB version, and MS claims that they'll support each version for ~10 years anyway). Because MS doesn't want too many things in this edition to change, things like Edge, Cortana and the Windows Store are stripped out of it. MS's intended usage scenarios for this edition are things like POS machines and the like.
You can actually compare this to Ubuntu upgrades. If you're on CB, you're like the Ubuntu user who upgrades between point releases as soon as the new one becomes available. If you're on CBB, you're like the Ubuntu user who upgrades between point releases as soon as the old one is about to become unsupported. If you're on LTSB, then you're the Ubuntu user who only ever uses the LTS releases.