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.
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.
Yeah, I’ve used windows from prior to 3 (when it was more of a shell to navigate DOS apps) to 3.11, 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, XP, XP SP2, Vista, 7, 8, and 10 (and probably NT via school). The only ones I’d describe as awful are the < 3 version (mostly because I was already using 95 at the time), 95 (unstable mess), ME (even more unstable mess), and 8 (UI screamed “we need to make our OS more appealing for the tablet market”). Vista might be the one I spent the most time on, now that I think of it.
Are you a masochist?
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.
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).
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.
Vista was a terrible OS. You can’t just ignore the hike in hardware requirements as if it wasn’t one of the defining parts of the Vista experience. It’s not just that people didn’t have the hardware to run Vista; people bought new hardware with Vista preinstalled that ran like dogshit! In other words, people essentially paid to have a downgrade. An OS that doesn’t run well is bad and no amount of features can change that.
LOL wasn’t ME sorry of a bolt on to 98? IIRC that was the most unstable version of Windows I had ever used. It actually forced me to explore Linux as a desktop seriously for the first time (and shit was jacked in 98-00). I seriously used NT4 as a desktop because it was the most stable version of Windows I could find at the time. Hard time playing games though.
It was basically supposed to be one last short-lived DOS based Windows version before Windows switched to an NT base with XP, and in that sense it served its purpose. But although it was a separate product, it was basically '98 second edition in a box. It certainly worked to push people towards jumping to XP a year later, lol. XP is still the best version of Windows MS ever made, IMO. Heard good things about 7, but I was already daily driving Linux by the time 7 was released after Vista bricked itself.
I remember using 2k for a long time, after the laughably unstable previews where mice would go crazy. I don’t remember exactly what the tool was called, but I was an MCSE back then and had the big binder of MS discs, so I would build my own windows ISOs with a bunch of the built in drivers stripped out and slip stream other packages like Firefox in. Would end up with core installs of only a few hundred MBs. Did the same with XP when it came out, but I started daily driving Ubuntu around 2004 and I left Windows behind for the most part with the exception of work.
I’m sure battery life is still better with Windows, but it’s not enough to make me want to go back to it, I’d probably pick up a Mac before that happens.
I wish I was old enough to have access to install NT on the family compute at the time. My aunt and uncle had ME and it was bad enough that i knew to keep it off my family’s machine. Instead I stuck with 98 SE until XP and it gave me an excuse to build a new machine at the same time.
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.
Vista was amazing and 8/8.1 was refreshing. Also, Vista introduced hardware accelerated desktop rendering in Windows, finally no more tearing. I enjoyed using them. I personally haven’t had any gripes with any of the recent Windows versions.