What are you trying to run? a VPS is pennies, and a phyiscal server isn’t much more. We have a bunch of servers that are $40 a month each and they come with 5 usable IPs, 32 gigs of ram, 1tb SSD etc. The cost of getting a static IP for home will be almost as much as a server. If you want less you can get less for a lot less money.

I’ve self hosted my own personal website for years now and it’s not really an issue outside of the power going out and my IP changing. I just update DNS and move on. But if this is for an actual work? Just pay the $10 a month, not having to worry about it is worth that money.

And there’s a ton of tools to remove the bloat from regular windows. Honestly the biggest problem with those is they tend to go hog wild and remove too many things so you have to be careful with them and not just blindly click “remove everything possible”.

The major H2 updates do legitimately add a lot of features that people would actually want, that LTSC and IoT don’t get. If you’re mostly playing older games that’s not a problem. But if you’re trying to play games that just recently came out it can be. Windows 10 stopping at 22H2 has kinda put a pause on that, but I’m sure once it goes EOL Microsoft games will resume the “march of progress” and start requiring new features.

I’ll want to make use of a lot of Windows features like virtualization, the ability to run Android apps, and the Linux subsystem.

Just stick with regular windows 11. Windows updates don’t come out that often, and feature updates can be ignored for 6+ months.