Windows 10 iot is not windows 10. I don’t think it even has a desktop. It’s designed for embedded not a personal computer. It’s designed for machines that run one program only.

You can’t always “install windows 11 easily” the system requirements for 11 shut out a lot of older machines arbitrarily. Windows thinks my relatively new machine, built in 2020 with modern hardware, “doesn’t meet the system requirements” because it “doesn’t have a tpm” (it does). I think a bios change fixes it? But for now it keeps me on 10 and that’s fine with me.

Using Linux is an option, but not an easy one for many users.