Steam has now officially stopped supporting Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.::95.57 percent of surveyed Steam users are already on Windows 10 and 11, with nearly 2 percent of the remainder on Linux and 1.5 percent on Mac — so we may be talking about fewer than 1 percent of users on these older Windows builds. Older versions of MacOS will also lose support on February 15th, just a month and a half from now. Correction: It’s macOS 10.13 and 10.14 that are losing support. Not macOS period.
This is the sole reason my gaming rig is now running on Ubuntu. I have never had Linux on my personal computer before but since I was forced to update the OS anyway, I thought might aswell give Linux a shot.
Dude, Windows 7/8/8.1 hasn’t been supported by Microsoft for quite a while now. No reason to support the platform, if Microsoft doesn’t
I, for one, am glad that from a security standpoint that companies like Valve are stopping support and giving patches and stuff to people using such outdated operating systems. If you are forced to use an old OS for work because of software limitations, that’s one thing, but there should be no reason you use an old OS as your daily driver if you ain’t getting any more security updates and patches. I don’t care how long it would take to reset everything and get things set up again, upgrade your damn OS when it’s not being supported anymore!
8 and 8.1 is a shame. Best versions if Windows we’ve ever had.
Are/were you a big fan of Vista and ME as well?
Vista wasn’t actually a bad OS, it just got a bad reputation pretty fast because it had higher hardware requirements than XP and most people didn’t have decent enough hardware for a smooth experience. That in combination with the new UAC feature that most people thought was annoying drove people away pretty fast, although the OS itself wasn’t bad - in fact, it’s pretty similar to Windows 7.
Then it’s an example of a previous time Microsoft made the same dumb decision it made with Windows 11; setting hardware requirements too high for a large enough subset of your customer base that it will be noticed and cause part of that subset to drop your product instead of purchase compatible hardware. I did use Vista for about a year back when it was the latest Windows version, but even with a laptop that had it pre-installed, it lagged like crazy and eventually straight-up died irrecoverably. Installed Linux on that laptop, it worked fine, and have only really used Windows for work at my job I have to use it for since. If you control an almost monopolistic market share like MS does and you want to keep that market share, you have to keep in mind any types of hardware that a reasonably large portion of your userbase uses and make sure your product works solidly on that hardware. You can certainly drop support for really old or rare stuff, you have to move along SOME innovation, but the whole incompatibility problem with 11 shows that MS didn’t quite fully learn their lesson from Vista.
Yeah, many OEM manufacturers wanted to jump onto the „Vista-compatible“ train and installed it on their low-end hardware, even though they shouldn’t have. This probably also played a big part in why Vista was considered bad.
99 % of people didn’t “upgrade windows” back then. That would have required buying a whole new, full-price, license (or pirating). Even Service Packs were a whole deal to install. In those days you’d use your OEM Windows license the computer came with and that’d be that.
What did actually happen was OEMs selling millions of brand new shitbuckets, particularly laptops, with 1GB of RAM. That was fine on XP, but barely enough to boot Vista and if you stared any program it would swap like a motherfucker (sure, maybe it should have used less memory, but 7 wasn’t any better yet people were fine with it). Microsoft’s real mistake was allowing OEMs to sell new machines with 1 GB of RAM (IDK if it was to allow OEMs to install Vista on existing SKUs, but regardless it was the critical mistake that made everyone despise Vista).
Vista was fine. I never had any issues.
It was during this time the transition to 64 bit systems became necessary to deal with needing to have more than 4GB of memory which was not helped by Vista using 2GB just to run, iirc. If you ran Vista 32 bit you had memory problems. If you ran Vista 64 bit you had major compatibility problems. It wasn’t until the end of Vista’s life did 64 bit go mainstream.
What can I say? I had a laptop with Vista pre-installed and it was fine.
Worst of both worlds.
Win10 beats it by a mile.
Only way to make the win better would be mire privacy.
Ow… and Windows 11 also have stronger hardware requirements, making your laptop not usable in the future if Windows 10 is also deprecated. Causing more and more e-waste ;( just because of software from Microsoft.
Lmao i only knew they could stop supporting windows 7, people uae more windows 7 than windows 8
WTF is Windows 8.1?
The fix for the god awful TileOS decision.
I didn’t conceptually hate the UI there was just so much room for improvement in implementation, if I recall correctly. I was only using a Windows machine for a short time during that era though.
That’s why the Win10 start menu was better.
Tiles where it’s appropiate and you could even nake the start full screen to top it of.And then the Windows 11 came in and replaced those sweet flexibility with generic row of icons on top with the app list now in the separate menu and the bottom of the menu is wasted on ads and other garbage
Geez thank you Microsoft, you guys definitely went backwards with this one
Not like there were sponsored tiles on Win10 (at a minimum 1803 when I started to use Windows professionally and saw lot’s of desktops)
Windows 8.1 was a major update that undid a lot of UI updates that people didn’t like after 7
I had already uninstalled and replaced it with 7.
Launching 8 for the first time was almost as bad as time I first experienced vista, so I can understand there being fewer 8 users.
I’m on Linux :)
I’m on windows 11 :)
That is up to you of course. Luckily I left Microsoft Windows 12 years ago. No more.
Translating into Linux terms, Steam has dropped support for:
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolian
Microsoft doesn’t even support Windows 7 or 8 anymore, so hardly a surprise. Affected customers can switch to either Windows 10/11 or Linux.
