There is absolutely no excuse to be running Windows 7 in 2024

[libadwaita (she/her)]

I've been watching here over the past few months as quite a few people complain about the Steam client going EOL on Windows 7.

Thing is, there is absolutely no reason why an average home user or PC gamer should be running Windows 7 in 2020, let alone 2024. I can get that some businesses need to run legacy software, but most of you reading this are just home users.

I'm guessing a pretty common argument will be legacy hardware, but guess what: Your hardware isn't tied to Windows 7. If your hardware is so old that it won't run modern versions of Windows very well, try upgrading to a modern GNU/Linux operating system or a debloated version of Windows 10/11.

Modern GNU/Linux operating systems range from significantly less intensive to just about as resource intensive as Windows 7 is, and you are getting a modern and secure operating operating system.

If you have a piece of software that doesn't work in newer versions of Windows, there are 3 options for you. The best one would be to see if the app can run in wine under GNU/Linux, as sometimes wine can have better compatibility for older apps than Windows does. Failing that, either have a tiny partition (<32GB) that you dualboot (if the app is 3D accelerated) or run it in a virtual machine (if the app is not 3D accelerated).

You cant expect software to support such an old operating system forever. Valve and various other developers should not be expected to hold onto legacy and insecure code just to placate the desires of a tiny minority (Windows 7 users make up less than half of the population of GNU/Linux users) who still want to use an ancient operating system for whatever reason.

Windows 7 is a 14 year old operating system, let it die already. openSUSE 11.2, Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 12, and Mac OS X 10.6 came out around the same time as Windows 7 did, and all died far before Windows 7 did. You should be thankful that Valve provided 5 years of support for Windows 7 let alone 14 years.

[Chika Ogiue]

The sad fact is, this thread won't convince the last of the hold-outs. None of the billion threads before it convinced them, either.

[potato]

Originally posted by Chika Ogiue:

The sad fact is, this thread won't convince the last of the hold-outs. None of the billion threads before it convinced them, either.

time will

[_Mud$]

When you get older, you dont want things to change. That is a fault of human nature. The newer versions of windows dont offer anything to them, other than the headache and the money of a new install.

Linux is difficult to use because it is different thus imperceptible/impossible to see the truth. It doesn't help that Linux distros, for the longest time, were impossible for some to use. The brand is tarnished by this, you cant sell it no matter how hard you try.

[Haruspex]

Originally posted by _Mud:

When you get older, you dont want things to change. That is a fault of human nature. The newer versions of windows dont offer anything to them, other than the headache and the money of a new install.

Linux is difficult to use because it is different thus imperceptible/impossible to see the truth. It doesn't help that Linux distros, for the longest time, were impossible for some to use. The brand is tarnished by this, you cant sell it no matter how hard you try.

Years and years of Microsoft funded FUD didn't help matters either. See the Halloween Documents[en.wikipedia.org].

[lsdninja]

Originally posted by Haruspex:

Years and years of Microsoft funded FUD didn't help matters either. See the Halloween Documents[en.wikipedia.org].

1998-2004, lol.

You didn't need an awful lot of FUD at that time.

[Haruspex]

Originally posted by lsdninja:

Originally posted by Haruspex:

Years and years of Microsoft funded FUD didn't help matters either. See the Halloween Documents[en.wikipedia.org].

1998-2004, lol.

You didn't need an awful lot of FUD at that time.

Yet Microsoft was still clearly spooked. Much of the negativity you still hear today about Linux stems directly from this campaign.

[libadwaita (she/her)]

Originally posted by lsdninja:

Originally posted by Haruspex:

Years and years of Microsoft funded FUD didn't help matters either. See the Halloween Documents[en.wikipedia.org].

1998-2004, lol.

You didn't need an awful lot of FUD at that time.

There's quite a bit of misinformation on how bad GNU/Linux was in those days, even propagated by GNU/Linux users today.

I have made this argument (not on Steam) before. It was mocked when people claimed it back than, but in my opinion the "Year of the Linux desktop" was between 2002-2005. That's not to say that it's gotten worse since than (far from that), but that it simply became good enough to replace Windows or MacOS for the average person.

You surely did need quite a bit of FUD to combat that. This was about the time that GNU/Linux became competitive with Windows on the desktop in terms of ease of use and general functionality.

We would see the birth of the most popular distros during this time. Mainly: Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE. We would see the birth of GNOME 2 and GNOME's focus on being a competitive desktop environment verses Windows and MacOS.

It was also taking the server and high performance workstation crowd by storm, since companies were looking to replace their old UNIX workstations and servers around this time. With the fact that commerical UNIX was dying around the early 2000s, GNU/Linux basically ate most of it's marketshare as it was fairly easy to port applications from the various commercial UNIX flavours to GNU/Linux. It also meant that companies weren't locked in to one OS on one architecture (i.e Solaris on SPARC)

GNU/Linux would have had to become good on the desktop because a large part of the people that were migrating to GNU/Linux were developers, from the dying breed of UNIX workstations. Many of these developers would end up migrating from MIPS or SPARC to the new AMD64 (x86-64) architecture, which would also mean that they would be less likely to own 2 computers on 2 operating systems and are more invested on running their main computing tasks and development on one computer & operating system (i.e Solaris on SPARC & Windows on i386 > GNU/Linux on AMD64). That's not to say that the practice has gone away entirely, but it's much less common than it was before GNU/Linux was popular among developers. Nowadays, it often takes the form of having GNU/Linux on your main system, and Windows in a virtual machine for testing.

By around 2003, X11 on GNU/Linux was good enough that there would be a very high chance that your graphics hardware was supported. Sound and networking were in a relatively similar state.

People like to complain about how bad GNU/Linux was back than without seriously acknowledging how bad Windows was back than too. Windows XP was just about as buggy as competing GNU/Linux distros at the time, the main difference is that more people have rose tinted glasses for Windows XP than GNU/Linux. Windows XP also had (in my opinion) a far less intuitive and more dated GUI than GNOME 2 did.

[lsdninja]

Originally posted by libadwaita (she/her):

*snip*

As someone who was using it back then, it was straight up trash. The modern era of serious software support and beginning to stop treating UI/UX as an afterthought is less than 20 years old.

[libadwaita (she/her)]

Originally posted by lsdninja:

Originally posted by libadwaita (she/her):

*snip*

As someone who was using it back then, it was straight up trash. The modern era of serious software support and beginning to stop treating UI/UX as an afterthought is less than 20 years old.

I'm sorry you had a poor experience back than. Not everyone did, though, at least compared to Windows.

I'm not saying that it was an amazing experience, but it was about on par with Windows. GNU/Linux was trash compared to today, but Windows XP wasn't much better.

Operating systems in general have gotten much better.

[lsdninja]

Originally posted by libadwaita (she/her):

I'm not saying that it was an amazing experience, but it was about on par with Windows. GNU/Linux was trash compared to today, but Windows XP wasn't much better.

Spending serious time in Windows XP after something like 2-3 years of dailying Linux was a revelation.

[76561199575779716]

I think its fine idk

[CygGame]

I never got into seven. I was xp. out of computers and then into windows 10. Now I have been spending more time in XP again, and it rocks. Nothing really beats that start menu.

[ReBoot]

There's that weird thing humans do: when confronted with facts and/or common sense contraditcting their irrational beliefs, they entrench those beliefs even more. I do not understand why humans do that (it's frankly dumb AF) but humans tend to do that.

My point is, indeed no point to present facts nor common sense when someone's clinging to irrational beliefs.

[KharnTheKhan]

Originally posted by ♥libadwaita♥:

I've been watching here over the past few months as quite a few people complain about the Steam client going EOL on Windows 7.

Thing is, there is absolutely no reason why an average home user or PC gamer should be running Windows 7 in 2020, let alone 2024. I can get that some businesses need to run legacy software, but most of you reading this are just home users.

I'm guessing a pretty common argument will be legacy hardware, but guess what: Your hardware isn't tied to Windows 7. If your hardware is so old that it won't run modern versions of Windows very well, try upgrading to a modern GNU/Linux operating system or a debloated version of Windows 10/11.

Modern GNU/Linux operating systems range from significantly less intensive to just about as resource intensive as Windows 7 is, and you are getting a modern and secure operating operating system.

If you have a piece of software that doesn't work in newer versions of Windows, there are 3 options for you. The best one would be to see if the app can run in wine under GNU/Linux, as sometimes wine can have better compatibility for older apps than Windows does. Failing that, either have a tiny partition (<32GB) that you dualboot (if the app is 3D accelerated) or run it in a virtual machine (if the app is not 3D accelerated).

You cant expect software to support such an old operating system forever. Valve and various other developers should not be expected to hold onto legacy and insecure code just to placate the desires of a tiny minority (Windows 7 users make up less than half of the population of GNU/Linux users) who still want to use an ancient operating system for whatever reason.

Windows 7 is a 14 year old operating system, let it die already. openSUSE 11.2, Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 12, and Mac OS X 10.6 came out around the same time as Windows 7 did, and all died far before Windows 7 did. You should be thankful that Valve provided 5 years of support for Windows 7 let alone 14 years.

Youre absolutely correct and the thing is Society will leave them behind, If they havent already hermit-ted themselves already. They should realize that complaining is just hurting themselves not others.

[June]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.