Well the last good windows is dead.
Once windows 10 is dead I am full Linux, I have already begun the transition, any time I have to install a new Os it’s now fedora 40.
No reason not to go now.
Time, my last hold out is my main gaming rig, I have it set up exactly as I want it and I don’t want to rewrite the entire thing.
Valid
Fedora 41 is the newest now
Well W7 is practically 15 years old, and already stopped receiving updates itself. It's not really up to Steam to keep it up and running ~~even~~ especially if Microsoft no longer bothers to update the OS, it would just get more and more problematic, and they also had to let it go at some point.
I don't think anyone cares about W8 though, even Microsoft itself barely seemed to put effort in making it work.
To be fair, it's not just a steam thing. My understanding of the situation is that chromium is dropping win7 support so anything using chromium will stop working on older operating system.
Steam uses the Chromium embedded framework in case anyone doesn't know. This renders the web pages in the Steam client. As mentioned, there's no point in Valve maintaining the code base themselves when upstream Chromium drops support for 7.
This is similar to when browsers dropped support for Flash. Adobe stopped developing it and the major browser vendors removed their in-house flash plugins.
I actually disagree here, as I have games that I purchased that only work in win98/winXP/7 I think they should make one “last” version that supports those old systems to facilitate the old games on these old versions. No new features or anything just what’s needed to provide access to these old games
Isn't the last version already that..well..last version?
If anything they could just leverage their work with proton that allows steam to play windows games on Linux to provide similar compatibility shims for old windows on modern windows
There is a version of it on Internet Archive that I don't know if it's from Valve or not. It's zipped installation of Steam. But I had no luck making it work, it's webpage renderer still crashes at launch. As I've read into it, the old version should work for a while without updates.
RIP Win7. You did what no other Windows could do. You had functioning components.
Win 7 really was the best of them all.
Kinda weird of me to be throwing this out there as a longtime Linux user, but TBF XP was quite good too, maybe even better for its time than 7.
TBF an online Windows 7 copy is just asking to be Hacked given Microsoft support ended in 2020 and security updates after that required a paid subscription which ended in 2023.
Pulls support or bricks the program on those systems? There's a difference.
Valve pulled support for Steam at the start of January 2024 for Windows 7/8. I thought that was the end, but apparently it actually just meant "Steam may still run but we don't support it in any way". Which surprised me when I booted up the old Windows 7 PC a few months ago and discovered that Steam still ran and seemed to work.
Apparently this update is actually incompatible and now Steam won't run at all.
It's probably the inbuilt browser component that seems to be in everything these days.
Chrome pulled support for Win 7 and 8 ages ago, so anything that relies on an up to date browser is sure to follow.
Oof thank you though
The title of that article is kind of weird. It's just wrong to claim they are dead for gaming because of a lack of steam.
Anyone can just get Witcher 3, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Stardew Valley, or Anno 2070 from GoG and for each of them you can game for another 50 hours without needing steam. Or get Minecraft from their page directly and play for 100 hours. This is all without going to any retro titles.
You need to tweak a lot to get latest minecraft java version running on Windows7
If you hate Windows 11 and don’t mind tinkering, I’d almost think Linux would be a better option especially if your preference is for retro games.
I've tinkered plenty even when using Windows haha. I even have a Windows 98 and Windows XP virtual machine for some old things, but everything I care about seems to have a modern HD release, a userpatch or can be hooked with dxwnd, so I don't use them anymore at the moment.
But yeah probably the long term solution is Linux. Personally I wouldn't run Windows 7 anymore. The unfixed CVE list has become quite long. I just went checking for the above titles out of principle, because I don't like this conflation of PC gaming with only Steam.
I still haven't made the jump to gaming on Linux, unfortunately. Although I've been running a dual boot for the last 8 years or so, because I used Linux for my studies, use it for my work, and for hosting my game servers on a second computer, so I would be in a prime position... but so far I have just gone the way of least resistance, which is still Windows 10 at the moment.
But I have a deadline now: October 2025. Just need to figure out the best distro, I don't think I'll use my existing Fedora KDE install for this. Maybe Arch, or one of these new immutable distros, that might be neat for when different games require different versions of libraries.
Minecraft is about to be a retro title.
AlwaysHasBeen.jpg
🧑🚀 🔫 👨🚀
The Chromium base, which is what Steam is built upon, itself isn't supported on Win 7,8. Can Valve work upon it to make it backwards compatible? Maybe. Will it be a pain in the ass to maintain? Absolutely.
Also, if you don't want to upgrade to Win11, you can make a 2nd partition for Linux and enjoy your games.
This is one of the things, that’s not only a colossal amount of effort to maintain, but also a colossal waste of money. Backporting security is expensive. Backporting features to an old is is even more costly. With the W7 platform shrinking into obscurity, it just doesn’t make sense
It's surreal reading comments pining for win7/8. i am getting old.
This is what game launchers looked like in my day.
If I wanted a different game I'd put in a different tape!
Im still preparing myself mentaly to jump to linux the next year with the out of service of 10. Its hard because stop using adobe as graphic designer... I hope we have get real linux alternative at that moment.
I believe in you! Personally, when I find someone charging me subscription prices for something that should have a one-time fee, I flip the bird and run to the nearest competitor, but I can't speak for your line of work. For my amateur needs, open source alternatives have gotten the job done, and I wish you the best.
As a profesional i dont have an alternative. Anyway i use the 2023 ver. Pirated. I dont like all that IA integration.
People will mention Gimp, but check out Krita as an alternative to Adobe
If you want to migrate to Linux, I would strongly suggest you set up a dual boot, and start playing with it to gain experience. Being able to switch back to something you know is a massive benefit when you are still learning.
While Linux has come a very long way, you are sure to experience some hitches along the way. If not because of Linux itself, then because you are not familiar with how to do "that one thing" on Linux.
Who still uses windows 7 or 8? Who actually uses it for gaming?
I was using 7 right up to the point last year steam said they'd stop supporting it.
I run a computer into the ground because I'm broke.
I did the same thing, but mostly because my computer worked, did what I needed it to do, and I was too lazy to replace it until I was basically forced to.
After building a new PC and switching over to Linux I was like "why didn't I do this a long time ago?"
There are a lot of reasons to not want to upgrade to Windows 10 or 11, so it's likely those people who defiantly choose not to move on. In the case of Windows 11, it also requires newer hardware just for TPM support.
We lost Yuzu because of a Windows 7 user. Whoever that guy was, he deserved this.
Does the CLI still work? If so, you could download and play all the Windows 7 compatible, DRM-free games in your library just fine. Alternatively, if you already had these games installed, they'll work fine without launching Steam first.
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