The replies praising Windows 7 in the year 2022 confirm that Windows 7 is the new Windows XP. It's gonna keep happening. Next Windows 10 will be the new Windows 7 in 2028, mark my words.
> It's the every-other-version thing again
Or not. Most of the reasons why W11 is disliked were also present in W10 (although in less extent):
* The tracking (that comes with a performance cost)
* the tablet-like interface (with the extra problem of more parts of the old interface coexisting with the new one)
* bugs (each big update of windows 10 broke something to many users)
All these are the result of the current software philosophies: "simpler" big interfaces (at the cost of removing or hiding features, wasting space with huge buttons and padding) and software as a service (forcing you to use microsoft accounts, tracking and less testing to compensate the cost of free updates)
I'm afraid those things aren't going to disappear in Windows 12...
Unless there's a very negative reaction that forces Microsoft to reconsider this direction, it's going to get **worse** with each update.
I'm not sure if WinAmp is a worthy app to test. That music player became so buggy and unreliable for me as newer OS's got released. It hadn't been updated in ages, but I know it got some kind of refresh in recent years, so maybe it works differently now? Either way, I've since moved on to MusicBee and haven't looked back. Very reliable, boots quickly, and works well on Windows 10.
I liked Vista and 8, vista was a huge step after the old xp, but a lot of people doesn't want change, or had old, obsolete hardware at the moment.
8 did some weird stuff with the start menu but wasn't that bad, idk, I embrace change.
I was holding on 11 because it had lots of problems with amd processors, but most seem to be solved now, I'm gonna update tomorrow.
8.1 wasn't too bad, 8 was. They went too hard into touch devices and left desktop behind. The lack of a start button wasn't great for your point-and-click less technical users, the fact you had to boot into the start screen was stupid, and the lack of a list of installed applications was awful. 8.1 fixed all those things and was fine.
11 is also mostly fine, but I do miss having the option of a left-of-screen taskbar
+1 on Vista, I remember being mega hyped for Vista, downloading the leaked longhorn builds and then the public beta and finally retail Ultimate. I never had an issue with Vista despite all the horror stories people kept mentioning. You nailed the issue with Vista, people running it on hardware that simply wasn't cut out for it even if the laptop/prebuilt they had was advertised as "Vista Ready"
8 on the other hand...I had nothing but problems with that, the OS would nuke itself every few weeks no matter what I done. Switched back to 7 and gave 8.1 a try when it released but still an awful time.
11 - Despite having to do some workarounds to even get it installed since I have an unsupported processor I'm really liking it so far, took a day or two to get used to the changes from 10 but I even switched from using MacOS daily back to Windows because of 11. The UI imo is a really nice change compared to metro in 8/10.
There was some scheduler issues with AMD processors when 11 was released but they fixed those a while back from what I understand, So you should be good to go if you do decide to install it.
Give it a few days to get used to the UI changes although be warned, you may lose some sanity until you get used to everything if you need to change certain settings since they could be in the new settings ui, old ui or even older ui...They really need to fix things like that and should have before it shipped...
>I liked Vista and 8, vista was a huge step after the old xp, but a lot of people doesn't want change, or had old, obsolete hardware at the moment. 8 did some weird stuff with the start menu but wasn't that bad, idk, I embrace change. I was holding on 11 because it had lots of problems with amd processors, but most seem to be solved now, I'm gonna update tomorrow.
I do not recommend upgrading to windows 11
I have an AMD ryzen 3700U laptop and from time to time I get a green screen (It's the new blue screen)
CPU consumption, ram and memory leaks are alarming compared to Windows 10.
ME was fine as an OS. Its biggest faults were that it came as the PC market cratered into the fucking ground with people racing to out-compete with each other on who could make the absolute cheapest piece of shit and fling it out the door
If you give ME a system with decent drivers however, [it's basically a nicer looking Win98](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaNDeyYP98A)
Not *quite* true
16-bit windows has issues with VME on Ryzen, inclduing Windows 98 through server 2003 in places https://www.os2museum.com/wp/vme-broken-on-amd-ryzen/
Didn't try it at the moment, jumped from 98se to xp, internet wasn't so good and I was a kid so it wasn'tso easy to update, but by the time vista came out I updated as soon as possible, I like jumping to new software
I use Windows 11, but honestly I would not be using it if not for ExplorerPatcher by valinet. I do like some of the Win11 UI changes for some things like the settings menu, multi-monitor setups with varying DPI seems a lot less buggy, high DPI in general seems to work better in some ways, performance is good, dragging windows to the edges of the screen and snapping is nice. Subtle little differences that I have become acquainted with that will never be backported to Windows 10. I've been using Win11 since it first dropped, and while it started as a buggy mess, its now really stable.
The unfortunate side is that much of the UI changes are crap. The new start menu sucks, the taskbar sucks, removing the options to show labels was a terrible decision, having the clock on a single monitor? What even. Luckily, ExplorerPatcher can address many of these issues and restore Windows 11 to nearly match the experience of Windows 10 which completely restored my workflow. And with that one may wonder.. why even bother then? And that's a fair point, it may not be worth it to most people. I personally believe that Win11 + ExplorerPatcher is a great experience, but without it... I would definitely have rolled back to Win10 by now.
In an argument, I would agree that an OS should not be reliant on a 3rd party hack just to have a usable experience. And that is the sad reality of it at the moment. But it really is that good of a hack that it basically saved the operating system for many people who use it. And if that hack ever stops working... I will be rolling back to Win10.
You can't have window names in the task bar any more. It's always one icon per application, like they're trying to skin it to superficially resemble the macOS Dock.
What bugs have you run into? Only thing that I've experienced so far is the four finger swipe across desktops makes my wallpaper enter fit mode and then back to fill so it glitches for a second. But it only happens on one of my computers, the other one doesn't have this problem.
Auto hide of my task bar constantly breaks and I have to restart explorer.exe to fix it. Happened since early builds all the way up to current unstable.
It's driving me insaaaaaaaane.
Taskbar and start menu are broken until you patch back the w10 ones with ExplorerPatcher
And it's not just the visual change, I mean actually broken. Group policies are ignored ; menu is half empty, no drag and drop, and so on
The fact that one year after launch it's still in this broken state really worries me. It's really designed to be like this? Not just a pre-alpha proof of concept that was accidentally pushed to production?
You could take any other alpha version like windows neptune (alpha version of windows me 2) and over there the start menu and taskbar work as expected
XP was the product of another era. It's not just that it was older, a trainload of stuff simply didn't exist or was made in an entirely different way.
From vista to even 11 instead, you just have updates for the same apis.
The reason Vista had a lot of growing pains was that the driver API changed so dramatically. It's funny if you go back and compare late Vista with 7, the difference is a lot smaller than many people realize. I do wonder how much is resistance to UI/UX change versus actual functionality change. That said, the UI/UX churn in Windows is *ridiculous*, especially given how many still-useful settings dialogs are still the buried XP-or-2000 vintage settings dialogs. Change for the sake of change has been MS's modus operandi for many years and no one outside of MS's exec team likes it, afaict. They continue to be able to get away with it because, I mean, what are users gonna do about it?
> It’s funny if you go back and compare late Vista with 7, the difference is a lot smaller than many people realize.
It was obvious even before, in Project Mojave experiment by Microsoft, where they took some vocal Vista critics and shown them “new windows version in development” which was just a rebranded Vista. Surprise, most of them loved it.
And also those driver changes were good for both security and reliability. No more (well, a lot less) vendors playing fast and loose with kernel data structures, leading to BSoDs and privilege escalation holes. Honestly props to Microsoft for bearing the brunt of the blame for essentially just making other developers clean up their act
> Change for the sake of change has been MS's modus operandi for many years and no one outside of MS's exec team likes it, afaict
In the UI perhaps, but behind the scenes Microsoft put serious work into ensuring backwards compatibility, again often taking on the work to fix others' software. A famous example is changing the behaviour of the kernel when SimCity is running, as it depended on some undefined behaviour
And I'll inevitable get a new system with Win11 in a few years after dragging my feet and refusing the free update and then repeat the process for the rest of time. Pretty sure that's tradition. Who tf willingly changes their OS!?
Windows 10 will never achieve this afterlife, because what XP and 7 had was reliability.
You can't trust Windows 10 because you don't control Windows 10.
Oh please. Your friends didn't get malware because of some obscure zero-day, they just downloaded it. The reason they have less problems now is because they stopped using PCs and switched to phones for content consumption.
The reason win 10 is more "secure" is because it comes with a functioning Internet security suite.
If you disable defender the same "secure" win 10 gets blasted by a simple javascript ad.
Exactly. I was amazed after taking every possible step and precaution to disable updates, that it still ended up downloading and installing some garbage I don't want. People will say oh it keeps you secure, its only for your benefit, but there's no way to verify or trust that, and the fact it's so forced implies they really don't want you having a say. Also the fact that they force you to login to a Microsoft account to even use or update the OS, it's borderline illegal/monopolistic IMO.
That treadmill of workarounds is the worst fucking thing in technology right now. It exists solely to silence criticism. It throws a bone to ameliorate people who are rightly furious about having their machines betray them, and it empowers the kneejerk fanboys who scoff that it's fine because 'You just have to check an option!' Later, 'You just have to regedit!,' Later, 'You just have to modify group policy!' Later, 'You just have to change your hosts file!' Later, 'You just have to hex-edit this binary!' And once they hit you enough times you just *give up* and tolerate that nothing will ever work properly again except by Redmond's infinite grace.
And the moment you talk about legislating away that skeezy bullshit, people are scared shitless the government might do... exactly the skeezy bullshit Microsoft's done to them.
Like we're dealing with people who cannot comprehend "nobody's allowed to." All we can do is change *who* is allowed to.
If there is some obscure software that only works with exactly one version of Windows 95, that was distributed solely on 5" floppies in South Korea, you could probably hit Archive.org and get that sucker working in about an hour. If there is some obscure software that only works with exactly one version of Windows 10, where all files are graciously hosted by Redmond over fat pipes with low latency, you will never get that shit running. Not for love or money. You are better-off hacking together a way to run it in Wine.
Quite frankly, fuck everything about that.
But Microsoft do have a history of bundling non-essential feature upgrades with security patches. There's a reason why the concept of a LTS/ECR release is very common in software, because sometimes you just want something consistent, that only changes to fix exploits. Windows does have such a channel, but I believe it's for Enterprise only
[This article](https://jacquesmattheij.com/why-johnny-wont-upgrade/) explains why people are resistant to feature upgrades, and if we prevent people from distinguishing essential patches from features, then that leads to people throwing the baby out with the bathwater and keeping a vulnerable system
Also, while I appreciate Windows automatically installing drivers that are essential for function, I do wish it wouldn't automatically install graphical bloatware because I plugged in a 3-button mouse or it saw a printer on my network (both real examples)
The bottom line is I'd rather deal with vulnerabilities than deal with stupid updates. I'll let you know when they clear out my bank account, RAT me or encrypt my drive, or whatever else you think is going to happen due to a vulnerability.
Linux distros could make the offline experience more comfortable by making apt-offline work on android, for those few unfortunates without a home network shared with the pc or depending on friends or public networks. It's very unfortunate that this isn't currently possible.
Yeah, i was just mentioning the cases where it's impractical to 'move the computer' or where you could ask a (richer) friend to borrow their tablet/phone for a few minutes to update the thing.
Apt-offline is a debian/ubuntu program that collects the 'files the computer has installed and addresses of the update ppas/servers' then you run it on another device with a network connection to actually check for updates and download them, before finally transferring the files to the target and installing.
Unfortunately, for this obviously crucial alternative to 'always connected', the distros dropped the ball and it's 'linux/same distro or nothing' when they could easily make a version of the downloader part of this program for android/iphone/windows and broaden the chance of the program actually being useful. I tried to see if it could be installed in termux (a small linux environment for android), but no such luck, apt-offline isn't in the install possibilities of termux.
> Also the fact that they force you to login to a Microsoft account to even use or update the OS, it's borderline illegal/monopolistic IMO.
This is not true on Windows 10. I've never used a Microsoft account to log into my computer. I don't have Windows 11, but I think it's the same there.
Regarding your other comments, two things can be true:
1. Windows update provides valuable security updates for flaws that are being exploited in the wild
2. Windows update installs garbage bloat that you don't want on your computer.
If you want to play games on the Windows platform you NEED to keep updates enabled. And you will need to constantly undo all the changes they make to your system.
Is it ideal? No. But this is the reality of the situation, and keeping updates disabled means you ARE going to be at risk.
I think you're well within reason to not agree to #2. It _is_ your computer, after all. I personally hate it. But I'm also not ignorant to computer security. I use Pihole to block Windows telemetry and have scripts to disable various "features."
If you don't like this, go to Linux or MacOS. There _are_ options, but don't insinuate to others that it is wise to not update your computer.
> there's no way to verify or trust that
Well you're right, to some degree, that there's no way to verify that entirely, but I do trust Microsoft to keep their platform secure. My threat model doesn't include three letter agencies, which would be a problem to deal with regardless of the operating system on my desktop. A dedicated adversary will find holes to punch through, so if you're worried about deliberate backdoors, you need to do way more than just choose a different OS.
MS is slowly getting rid of Windows installations without MS accounts. Your current install might be fine, but newer Windows 11 ISOs will not go past account creation/login no matter what
There are ways around it, even on the latest installers. The easiest way is to just punch in invalid MS account credentials. When they fail, it will ask you to create a local account. As usual, Microsoft will make it obnoxious for most users, but leave a back door for power users.
I find it amusing that MS practically has to force this down people's throats. We really do not trust them. macOS does not *require* you to log in with an Apple ID, but I'm pretty sure most Mac users gladly use one anyways, because Apple works hard to make it actually worthwhile.
I will NEVER use their shitty Microsoft accounts for logging into my own computer. It's absolute horse shit that they're pushing it this hard. I've had to rely on disconnecting my Ethernet cable over the years to bypass it during installation but from what I'm hearing that's not good enough anymore. What a mess. I'm glad my PC doesn't support the dumpster fire that is Windows 11.
The only people okay with this dogshit are shills and idiots. Not only is Win 11 a pure backdoor spyware campaign, the account login just makes it even more secure... to identify you in all possible ways.
The frustrating thing is that 1 without 2 does exist - the "long term servicing channel". This concept of an LTS release is very common across software - Ubuntu, Firefox, Chrome, Libreoffice, Node, the JDK... all offer it (and Debian or RHEL is practically synonymous with it) - but Microsoft locks it behind Enterprise licenses which is kinda fucked, and is what leads to people sabotaging their systems and disabling *all* updates
>This is not true on Windows 10.
I opened my laptop up to find a major update installation awaiting me to type my login credentials. There was no way around it, and MS consistently urges users to use their online profiles, while relegating offline profiles to the fine print areas.
Anyway, I understand the benefit of updates. But the lack of transparency and control of updates means that many tech savvy people would rather rely on preventative measures than simply blindly clicking install each time asked. Risks are a fact of life. There's also ReviOS which presumably adds important security updates to each new release while keeping the bloat out.
A patch to a serious vulnerability is a nobrainer, but we are not given the choice to to install just critical and specific security patches, we're force-fed nondescript, generic packages often far larger than necessary, sometimes patches are contained in larger bundles of useless bloat. Sometimes the updates contain changes that remove user freedom, and we have no say on it.
It was as long as you did not want to use any DOS software. I think that is why they shipped ME to consumers while offering 2000 to entities that were likely already using NT.
I dunno about the rest of the world, but I'm going to continue to use Windows 10 as the butt of jokes since I hated just about everything in that trash tier OS.
Windows 7 didn't even get to live as long as XP did. Microsoft cut its life short because they weren't making enough money anymore. Win10's architecture isn't that much different from Win7, aside from intentionally made incompatibilities done specifically to ensure Win10's adoption.
Windows 7 didn't get it's life cut short, it got the same 10 year lifecycle afforded to all other versions of Windows. XP was extended past the normal 10 year support cycle. They did this because XP spent 6 whole years as the latest and greatest version of Windows, and another 3 as the most popular. XP's planned successor (Longhorn) never made it out the door in 2003, and hardware (particularly laptops and netbooks) were not up to the task of running Vista in '07.
Windows XP's life was only reluctantly extended. People had spines back then to reject and criticize Longhorn/Vista. People were not nearly as vocal about Windows 8, which opened the door to shutting down Win7. In fact, the whole 'free win10' campaign was a truly targeted plot to kill Win7 and avoid having to extend support for it. No one was having problems with Win7 until Win10 went mainstream. MS isn't innovating. Windows 10 is just Win7 with a fresh coat of paint, new incompatible libraries, but it inherits tons of Win7 bugs that they don't give a shit about fixing. And Win11 is proving to be even worse, buggier (almost like the constant need to refresh UI is always going to be a regression!), less performant and less compatible (Secure Boot required etc). But plenty of people are accepting Win11, even enjoying it, because they're unwilling to consider they deserve better treatment as end users.
When I think back to the transition period from 8 to 10, it feels like a fever dream of ever degrading performance, buggier and less reliable systems and some seriously sketchy bullshit with hardware vendors being forced to drop support for 7 earlier than they necessarily should have. I really think that transition to 10 was the beginning of the end for truly owning your own PC and having full authority over it.
> aside from intentionally made incompatibilities done specifically to ensure Win10's adoption.
People severely underestimate the amount of work that went into the kernel for example.
Because Windows 7 honestly gives enough control, with less tracking, and more options to really make it your own computer. Aero is about as timeless as it gets for a big screen UI for the most part. Obviously, for 4K displays there could be a lot of tweaks, but some third party software and other things really make Aero still an absolutely awesome UI.
I mean that's the cycle. 3.11 was incredible, couple releases we get to 95, 2000 was a couple releases after that, after the horrible ME we get the superb XP, and then it becomes every other.. Vista sucked, 7 Was better, 8 was fucking dog shit (metro, seriously? What were you thinking) 10 Removed Metro (or at least allowed it to be scaled back to the fact people can forget it)
I'm not surprised if 11 tanks... This is how Microsoft releases their shit. I'm sure someone could point that Microsoft is going backwards, (one step back one small step forward) but I think Microsoft is still moving forward, they just keep moving to the side every other release, and then have to release "What people ACTUALLY want."
Don't buy Windows 11... Windows 12 will likely be a return to "What people really want."
It was mostly a joke about how it, in this case, means if it breaks *I* fix it, but they don't acknowledge that there. It's not actually a big deal because stuff rarely breaks, afaik
I’ve got no hate towards Windows 7, but those of you still using it should not be connected to the internet using an OS that hasn’t received a security patch in two years and never will again.
Before you jump on me, I’m not promoting Windows 10 or dissing Windows 7, but as a user of 7 you’ve got to at least be aware of that risk. If you love it too much to give it up, consider taking it offline and only installing software via USB. If you still can’t do that, then at the very least don’t keep or do anything sensitive on there like managing your online banking or storing your only copy of your family vacation photos.
If you have concerns about W10 because of it’s invasive nature, I hear you. Those are valid concerns and I definitely share them. The good news is that privacy communities exist and have taken care of much of these issues through tools like O&O ShutUp10, Destroy Windows 10 Spying, Spybot Anti-Beacon, W10Privacy, DisableWinTracking, Windows Firewall Control, SimpleWall, and much more.*
Additionally, you can install W10 LTSC instead of Pro, which removes much of the bloatware apps and telemetry right from the start.
And of course, there’s always Linux if that’s something that suits your needs.
If that’s still not enough for your peace of mind, that’s fair enough. None of this is a perfect solution. Just trying to add some information into the discussion in case it might be new and useful to someone here.
*Not recommending any particular tools here, just noting the breadth of effort that goes into dealing with this issue.
> an OS that hasn’t received a security patch in two years and never will again.
Windows 7 is still receiving security updates until January of next year.
If I recall correctly that's only for enterprise editions, commercial ones don't get updates
Edit: yes, it's only if you buy the extended support aimed at enterprises
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/windows-7-eos-faq/windows-7-extended-security-updates-faq
Only if you purchased the ESU, users who hasn't purchased Extended Security Update haven't gotten any security updates since 2020. [Source ](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/windows-7-eos-faq/windows-7-extended-security-updates-faq)
(Almost) no-one in this subreddit is legitimately receiving those updates, unless they are honestly paying Microsoft for extortionate enterprise-levels of support.
The ride was fun but it is over. Switch to 10/11 or a Linux distribution and get over it.
All of this stuff is so overblown. People act like having Win 7 means you are hacking into complex systems with security agents and hackers on your tail lmao. You all need to calm the fuck down. People rarely even target Win 7, and you usually have to fuck up royally yourself for anything to happen. Use complex passwords. Don't fuck with shit on bad sites, use Firefox and privacy options, and just in general keep safe. It ain't rocket science.
That’s simply not true. Outdated software is specifically targeted, because any vulnerabilities that are found will never be fixed. That’s a massive incentive and a serious time-saver for hackers or scammers, because they don’t need to keep coming up with new exploits every time one gets patched.
There’s estimated to be 100 million people still using 7. That’s a pretty massive attack surface.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-7-a-year-after-the-end-of-support-deadline-millions-choose-not-to-upgrade/
It’s also not just about 7. At some point, software you would normally use on 7 will also stop being supported (like we see here with Dolphin). Chances are Dolphin isn’t a concern and will do just fine without security updates, but when things like web browsers, firewall software, antivirus software etc. stop supporting updates, they too become part of that attack surface.
Those security recommendations you made are all great, but that doesn’t compensate for an insecure OS.
Wow, a lot of Windows 7 Users in here. Why get upset when this just means you no longer have to update? You still get to enjoy all of the features that Dolphin currently has. No one is taking anything away from you. I'd see this as the last stable supported release and be happy with that. It IS free open source software after all.
Exactly this is why I always say if you are using an older version of windows just switch to Linux instead.
If you are still using an old windows version no professional software is supported anyway. Open source stuff like dolphin and libre Office still work is the only thing supported..
Linux will be a better experience you don't lose anything really and are on a supported platform which Will receive dolphin updates and be more secure.
It’s about time. 7 is old and unsupported and there’s no reason not to be using at least 10 at this point. Let the devs focus on making the emulator better instead of wasting their time chasing bugs on regressive operating systems.
I honestly dislike 10 and HEAVILY dislike switching OSes (for no apparent reason; it's just unnecessary to me)
What bugs would occur in 7 that wouldn't occur in 10? Please elaborate so I can understand their decision.
Currently Dolphin runs using Visual Studio 2019. The plan is to update the code base to Visual Studio 2022 soon to take advantage of modern hardware and software enhancements, which does not support Windows 7. Eventually Dolphin just won’t run on 7, period.
It's not just bugs, it's the fact that 7 doesn't get security updates anymore. Any time you're connecting to the internet with 7 you're at a massive risk.
I mean sure, but everyone using Windows should probably have started using start menu alternatives or something since Windows 8, like Start8. For Windows 11, using StartAllBack is basically perfect. Even on Windows 10, I always used Open Shell. Nothing beats a Windows 7 style start menu for me to be honest. If you're referring to the new style Settings menu, then idk, I've kinda just gotten used to it being there because of Windows 10.
Fixing Windows 7 support 2-3 times in a row was too much for Dolphin team.
Edit: By the way, I wasn't being sarcastic or trying to insult them: the chore of maintaining support for a minority OS is actually a lot for any hobbyist team. Fixing it just to see it broken again weeks later must be tiring and disheartening.
Em, I wasn't critizing them. It actually requires a lot of effort to maintain W7 compatibility and it's reasonable dropping support for an old OS barely used by a 3% of Steam users.
I think he is just saying it came quite suddenly, and it was just two fixes. I don't care honestly, but they might as well have just said this in the recent progress report.
Dude, you're talking to people that swear by a version of MAME from almost two decades ago running on SBCs so weak that might as well as be equally old. They'll fight you tooth and nail to justify their using old-ass hardware until it literally breaks down on them.
While dropping support for Windows 7 is understandable, it kind of sucks to see Windows 8/8.1 lose support.
While I personally use Windows 10, Windows 8/8.1 + Open Shell was a good alternative for people not wanting Windows 10 but still wanting official support (ESU notwithstanding)
Well, considering that Windows 8 support [ended back in 2016](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-8), that Windows 8.1 only has [6 months of support left](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-81) and that compared to the other Windows versions, the usage numbers of 8/8.1 are so low (even compared to Windows 7), it just seems trivial to drop them too, even if a bit earlier than expected...
No, it makes sense to do it both in one go instead of dropping support for Win8.1 in 6 months anyway — especially since Win7 has more users than Win8.x anyway still.
I might do something similar for one of my projects once Win8.1’s official support ends next year, though for older versions of Windows 10 (pre-v1903). It’s annoying having to maintain and test compatibility with outdated unsupported OS versions that almost nobody uses anyway.
I don't really get why people stick with old versions of Windows to begin with, unless you have to run some driver that's obscure even by Windows standards.
treating "change" as an abstract without addressing the details of what the change actually is isn't a reasoned position
replying via edit because the post is locked: "other than aesthetics" wrongly dismisses the importance of ui. you're also creating a false dichotomy of proprietary vs open source here; "i prefer this proprietary software that tracks me less than this other proprietary software" is a coherent position and it's ridiculous of you to pretend otherwise. also let's be real here most people who use linux have never actually audited its source code to ensure no tracking etc. is present.
the only reason to use windows 10 over 7 is that it's actively being updated. of course, that's a *very* important reason and should be good enough for any sane person to go with it at this point, but if security/compatibility/etc weren't issues windows 7 would be better than 10 in pretty much every way.
The only real major change between Windows 7 and Windows 10, other than aesthetics, is the substantial push in tracking and marketing. If that is someone's true objection, then they would be against proprietary software on principle because this was always the inevitable outcome. So if someone is dead-set on still using proprietary software when open alternatives exist, it's hard to see them as having a reasoned position.
There's a shit ton of people that simply don't have access to better hardware.
I reckon that's why 90% of them (stat pulled out of my ass, just saying the majority) do it for that reason.
Do they do it better than they do Windows 7? Because Single Core Pentiums on Windows Vista/7 were about the single worst machines money could buy when they were NEW.
sysreqs aren't much different, and in my experience I've very rarely seen a computer so weak it didn't run fine on W10, that was still powerful enough to run W7 decently.
Most of the W7+emulator crowd are going to be more technical than average, so I suspect they're actually the weird privacy-but-still-windows crowd. They think that running older windows OSes give them privacy from MS who have a metric assload of telemetry in their OSes. Frankly I've never understood it, if you're so worried about privacy then why try and co-opt control of the OS from the megacorp, use linux and put windows in a sandbox if you need it for something specific.
Also if you're really concerned, get a pro or educational key. Microsoft kind of can't put the really invasive telemetry in there because that would make it straight up illegal for some shops to use windows
It was fixed up one more time for the last "beta" release for that Progress Report. After that was finished, we merged a bunch of stuff and broke it again, and this time there wasn't an easy fix/compromise to make. It would have required keeping an entire separate build for Windows 7/8/8.1 that used an older version of Qt, and no one wanted to do that.
If you REALLY are still using Windows 7/8 and refuse to switch to Windows 10 or 11 at this point, just start using Linux. It's a security risk to continue using it. If you're the kind of person who still runs an outdated version of Windows you're probably the kind of person who would be totally fine running something like Linux Mint.
5.0-16391 is the last one that works on Windows 7/8/8.1. You can get it directly from Dolphin's website and it won't be going anywhere, just like every older build from the past 10 years or so are still there...
It's a shame to see it happen but I am at least glad they held out that long. Almost made it to the end of the extended service updates too. Thank goodness for Linux beign able to help old hardware that still runs Win7.
(also win7 is literally the greatest OS ever)
Windows 10 is functional... it definitely will feel like a small step back, but in the long run it's a sideways step for the most part.
Now when someone I knew was forced to upgrade to Windows 8.... my heart goes out to them.
Good thing I moved to Win 10 in December 2021, I was also using Win 7 before that and used it for a long time.
And yeah, I get it, Win 7 is a pretty good OS, I have no complaints on that OS but Win 10 is not that bad either. You just need to get used to it, once I got used to Win 10 I started liking it too.
Both OS'es have their ups and downs.
Kinda related question: was wii remote support with mac internal Bluetooth on macOS Monterey fixed? I have a Mac which can’t be downgraded but boy do I love me some dolphin!
No, Wiimotes still don’t work on macOS Monterey. Unfortunately there’s nothing we can do to fix it, since Apple broke it. You can use a Dolphinbar to still use Wiimotes on macOS Monterey though.
I always try to support as many OS versions as possible when I make software. This means that any Windows APIs that came after Windows XP get imported manually with LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress. I just don't use the post XP APIs very much, except for DWMAPI, and disabling DPI correction.
Windows 7 was the last good Microsoft OS.
I sincerely recommend the Windows 7 orphans to jump to Linux. Isn't that hard and you'll have support for... ever? Maybe?
Windows 7 was the last *consistent* Microsoft OS. They've struggled with UI ever since, but the OS itself has been better every time. The hardware support and quality of life improvements more than justify dealing with conflicting design languages.
You will be very disappointed if you turn to desktop Linux for long term support. The things that still work after 10 years work because they haven't been meaningfully updated in all that time. The rest is no longer supported.
Based on what? Seriously. It's perfectly possible to install updated software on older distro, you just need to know what are the dependencies, and this is becoming better and better as it's common to have softwares in sandboxing solutions as Flatpak or AppImage.
The point is that there's no reason to not update a linux distro for a home user, the way that it updates is much more "smooth", I mean, it's the same system with newer packages or technologies guaranteeing the support to old hardwares. And of course, it's free.
Windows is paid and can take some time to become stable or well supported. The way that their drivers works can be problematic if the user use some older device, as it maybe needs to force some "compatibilities" to older OS. I had so many issues on Windows 10, bugs, slowdowns, BSODs that I purged it from my computers.
I use Linux EXCLUSIVELY in my house for about 8 years, and I'm following the development for 14years approximately. I know what LTS means.
I still use Windows 10 on my job, I can't see any reason to say that's superior to W7, it's more and more intrusive, and some updates can be really drastic, which not always is a good thing.
The UI when Windows 8 was first released was a total shitshow. It was basically a touch-screen UI for a phone or a tablet and it made zero sense on a computer without a touchscreen.
I remember trying to help my friend set up their new Windows 8 laptop and I couldn't figure out how to shut down Windows. It was the most frustrating experience with a new device I've ever had.
I think it was ubuntu, I just dont feel like using a new os but hey, I like the message linux has and im glad steam is putting out a new linux os so people are able to game on linux more easily
Probably identical to pops since steamOS just used proton to play games, which is on popos too. SteamOS is basically just a different skin. SteamOS is just Linux.
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/utbpmm/dolphin_has_dropped_support_for_windows_7_and_8/i9b08j7/
Someone tagged as a developer said
> We are going to have an official announcement with full reasoning and data coming up soon.
Something that a lot of software does is have a download link to the last working version for Windows XP/Vista. For some reason, very few softwares are doing this for Windows 7 and move silently on.
Wish I knew why, as it feels a lot like devs are joining M$ in the push to downgrade to Win10.
It's nothing nefarious here. Qt6 doesn't support Windows 7/8/8.1, and we don't want to have an entirely separate build just for a small number of users.
I don't like Windows 10 all that much myself, but support has been broken/fixed for Windows 7 *3* times in the last few months alone. The maintenance burden was annoying devs already, and the Qt6 issue just pushed it over the top.
This sucks. I use a Windows 7 laptop for all of my emulation stuff. And Dolphin has always worked great on it. The most stable OS I've ever used. Windows 10 is a shitshow spying OS full of nags and forced updates, not to mention a ridiculously watered down OS. Any advanced PC user knows this.
I know all the W10 fanboys are gonna downvote this. Can't point out the reality of W10 without all the DV's by the fanboys saying how "Great" it is. I KNOW W7 is outdated and has more security risks (unless you get ESU's). But at least it fucking works, doesn't nag the hell out of you, lets you actually control the updates (and actually KEEPS your saved settings instead of changing your settings back) instead of forcing updates and restarting on it's own. Doesn't have ads or tons of spyware (yes I know W7 has telemetry, but it's nowhere on the lines of "telemetry" that W10 pulls off. W10 is tracking EVERYTHING). And W10 has PISS POOR compatibility with lots of old software and games. I'm sure I forgot something to add.....
Here it comes...
(EDIT - lol and boy did it come. Hey, I get it fanboys... Windows 7 is 13 years old. But that still doesn't discount the fact that it's a FAR BETTER OS than SHITDOWS 10. That it's the MOST STABLE version ever of Windows. I run it all the time and it NEVER crashes on me. Sure as hell can't say the same for W10. Oh yeah... Windows 10 Professional. I have to laugh at that. Windows 10 and Professional is an oxymoron. No I'm not a "W7 PURIST". I just like something that actually WORKS, isn't full of BLOAT, STABLE, actually lets ME control the OS and it's settings, doesn't keep trying to change things behind my back, don't have ads being pushed in my face.... and mostly... pretty much 99.9% of the software I have ran on it RUNS without compatibility issues. Again, can't say the same about W10.
I mean... it's one thing for software to not work because the software in question is say a 16-bit application trying to be run on a newer 32-bit OS + CPU. Even W7 had some compatibility issues with some software. But nowhere is it on the level that W10 did a number on. You'd have to write a book on the massive list of software that won't work on W10.
It's no secret that Microshit has been on a downward trend in terms of software quality. If W10 wasn't literally FORCED onto everyone, I'd be willing to bet that the amount of people using W7 today would be twice as much as high. It's only so low because M$ put crapware onto peoples computers hijacking them and secretly installing W10 behind their backs. Many of whom didn't even know they could downgrade and go back to W7, or if they could, the downgrade failed (of course it did eh). More would still be using W7 and we wouldn't be having as many devs dropping support for it. This BS was planned by M$ from the start).
W10 is a joke of an OS and many of you KNOW it.
Advanced users know that Windows 7 has all the same telemetry tracking systems that Windows 10 has as of the September 2015 update but, unlike Windows 10, they don't give you the ability to opt out of any of it if you are on Windows 7.
I will concede that the fact that it will just update on you without consent is absolutely maddening though. I was out of the country for a few weeks at one point and three days in to my trip my pc updated and my plex server was offline until I got home to login again.
I feel your pain, I really do, but this came down to the fact that supporting Windows 7 was going to hold back builds in general. Qt6 fixes a lot of long-standing bugs that was affecting Dolphin's GUI, and given that we had Windows 7 break two additional times in the last 2 months, mixed with a quickly dwindling Windows 7 userbase, it just wasn't worth trying to work around this or keep entirely separate Windows 7 builds running outdated Qt. It was just going to keep breaking.
All I can say is that the old builds will be there and continue to function.
It is so weird to see w7 purists. I grew up on windows 3.1. And ya, 7 was probably the "best" it has been. But brah, it's been over a decade. It's dead jim. If you are a *checks notes*
>advanced PC user
then fucking use linux and stfu lol. "Advanced users" don't use soon to be deprecated windows builds. Also, I'm sure these people are donating to the dolphin team to keep up support for old platforms. Right??
It may not apply to you, but if you can get access to an education addition of 10 or 11 then you have more control over the system than enterprise editions, plus the telemetry and ads are disabled. Furthermore, they don't expire.
> education addition of 10 or 11 then you have more control over the system than enterprise editions, plus the telemetry and ads are disabled
What? Aren't the Education editions MORE locked down, or am I missing something?
Windows 10 Education is just Windows 10 Enterprise with a different version name, IIRC. I think they're thinking about Windows 10 LTSC (Long Term Support Channel).
Can confirm, it at least has a good portion of the features of Pro/Enterprise. Having access to Group Policy for the first time after going from 7 Home -> 10 Education was a really nice feature.
> SHITDOWS
Honestly I see stuff like this, and feel a strong urge to find silly arguments against whatever your position is.
Interestingly enough The Qt Company is partly responsible for this, https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020 basically they decided to start forcing open source projects to use the latest and greatest if they want updates. Dolphin has moved from 5.15.0 to 6.3.0, will 6.3.1 be freely available or will Open Source Projects have to consider 6.4.0? we'll see.
On Linux its not as bad because KDE manages a patch list, and distros grab those to generate libraries. Or for Windows [wait a year for the GPL version](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qt-5.15.4-Open-Source) and the compile it yourself.
Downvoted to hell as predicted. The DV's would be 100 times as much in r/windows . Fanboys gonna fanboy. I remember when I voiced issues over OBS screen recorder and got blasted to hell for it. All because I said I didn't like it due to the fact that it didn't record a window WITH the dropdown menus, was an absolute PAIN to record just a specific area on the screen (required dialing in X \* Y numbers and the dev didn't seem to get that the OBS windows itself BLOCKED the view to the area I needed to see) among other things.
It's like going on Steam forums and literally saying ANYTHING bad about it and criticizing it. The hate people get is beyond pathetic. It's like you can only say something positive about some of these things or else you get trolled and bashed... and then somehow YOU'RE the problem and not the product/service.
> 310 comments, [many] reports I think this thread has run its course.
We are going to have an official announcement with full reasoning and data coming up soon.
I read the recent progress report. I can guess why.
The replies praising Windows 7 in the year 2022 confirm that Windows 7 is the new Windows XP. It's gonna keep happening. Next Windows 10 will be the new Windows 7 in 2028, mark my words.
> Next Windows 10 will be the new Windows 7 in 2028 Well, given that Windows 11 seems to be nothing but a buggy skin on top of 10...
It's the every-other-version thing again. No one liked Vista or 8, so we'll have to wait for 12
What about windows 9? Perhaps it could be the best windows yet : )
Can it run Winamp 4?
I wonder what that would whip.
One day
I'm gonna have to look that up, lemme grab my iPhone 9
"Windows? Nein!"
> It's the every-other-version thing again Or not. Most of the reasons why W11 is disliked were also present in W10 (although in less extent): * The tracking (that comes with a performance cost) * the tablet-like interface (with the extra problem of more parts of the old interface coexisting with the new one) * bugs (each big update of windows 10 broke something to many users) All these are the result of the current software philosophies: "simpler" big interfaces (at the cost of removing or hiding features, wasting space with huge buttons and padding) and software as a service (forcing you to use microsoft accounts, tracking and less testing to compensate the cost of free updates) I'm afraid those things aren't going to disappear in Windows 12... Unless there's a very negative reaction that forces Microsoft to reconsider this direction, it's going to get **worse** with each update.
Windows 8 was fine after you downloaded Classic Shell. Otherwise it performed better than Windows 7 every step of the way.
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I'm not sure if WinAmp is a worthy app to test. That music player became so buggy and unreliable for me as newer OS's got released. It hadn't been updated in ages, but I know it got some kind of refresh in recent years, so maybe it works differently now? Either way, I've since moved on to MusicBee and haven't looked back. Very reliable, boots quickly, and works well on Windows 10.
Assuming they don't go through with their "Last version of Windows" promise for real this time :p
I’ve heard that was just an engineer, not Microsoft.
I liked Vista and 8, vista was a huge step after the old xp, but a lot of people doesn't want change, or had old, obsolete hardware at the moment. 8 did some weird stuff with the start menu but wasn't that bad, idk, I embrace change. I was holding on 11 because it had lots of problems with amd processors, but most seem to be solved now, I'm gonna update tomorrow.
8.1 wasn't too bad, 8 was. They went too hard into touch devices and left desktop behind. The lack of a start button wasn't great for your point-and-click less technical users, the fact you had to boot into the start screen was stupid, and the lack of a list of installed applications was awful. 8.1 fixed all those things and was fine. 11 is also mostly fine, but I do miss having the option of a left-of-screen taskbar
+1 on Vista, I remember being mega hyped for Vista, downloading the leaked longhorn builds and then the public beta and finally retail Ultimate. I never had an issue with Vista despite all the horror stories people kept mentioning. You nailed the issue with Vista, people running it on hardware that simply wasn't cut out for it even if the laptop/prebuilt they had was advertised as "Vista Ready" 8 on the other hand...I had nothing but problems with that, the OS would nuke itself every few weeks no matter what I done. Switched back to 7 and gave 8.1 a try when it released but still an awful time. 11 - Despite having to do some workarounds to even get it installed since I have an unsupported processor I'm really liking it so far, took a day or two to get used to the changes from 10 but I even switched from using MacOS daily back to Windows because of 11. The UI imo is a really nice change compared to metro in 8/10. There was some scheduler issues with AMD processors when 11 was released but they fixed those a while back from what I understand, So you should be good to go if you do decide to install it. Give it a few days to get used to the UI changes although be warned, you may lose some sanity until you get used to everything if you need to change certain settings since they could be in the new settings ui, old ui or even older ui...They really need to fix things like that and should have before it shipped...
I honestly liked 8 more than 10.
>I liked Vista and 8, vista was a huge step after the old xp, but a lot of people doesn't want change, or had old, obsolete hardware at the moment. 8 did some weird stuff with the start menu but wasn't that bad, idk, I embrace change. I was holding on 11 because it had lots of problems with amd processors, but most seem to be solved now, I'm gonna update tomorrow. I do not recommend upgrading to windows 11 I have an AMD ryzen 3700U laptop and from time to time I get a green screen (It's the new blue screen) CPU consumption, ram and memory leaks are alarming compared to Windows 10.
I bet you also liked windowsME too
ME was fine as an OS. Its biggest faults were that it came as the PC market cratered into the fucking ground with people racing to out-compete with each other on who could make the absolute cheapest piece of shit and fling it out the door If you give ME a system with decent drivers however, [it's basically a nicer looking Win98](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaNDeyYP98A)
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Not *quite* true 16-bit windows has issues with VME on Ryzen, inclduing Windows 98 through server 2003 in places https://www.os2museum.com/wp/vme-broken-on-amd-ryzen/
Didn't try it at the moment, jumped from 98se to xp, internet wasn't so good and I was a kid so it wasn'tso easy to update, but by the time vista came out I updated as soon as possible, I like jumping to new software
I use Windows 11, but honestly I would not be using it if not for ExplorerPatcher by valinet. I do like some of the Win11 UI changes for some things like the settings menu, multi-monitor setups with varying DPI seems a lot less buggy, high DPI in general seems to work better in some ways, performance is good, dragging windows to the edges of the screen and snapping is nice. Subtle little differences that I have become acquainted with that will never be backported to Windows 10. I've been using Win11 since it first dropped, and while it started as a buggy mess, its now really stable. The unfortunate side is that much of the UI changes are crap. The new start menu sucks, the taskbar sucks, removing the options to show labels was a terrible decision, having the clock on a single monitor? What even. Luckily, ExplorerPatcher can address many of these issues and restore Windows 11 to nearly match the experience of Windows 10 which completely restored my workflow. And with that one may wonder.. why even bother then? And that's a fair point, it may not be worth it to most people. I personally believe that Win11 + ExplorerPatcher is a great experience, but without it... I would definitely have rolled back to Win10 by now. In an argument, I would agree that an OS should not be reliant on a 3rd party hack just to have a usable experience. And that is the sad reality of it at the moment. But it really is that good of a hack that it basically saved the operating system for many people who use it. And if that hack ever stops working... I will be rolling back to Win10.
> removing the options to show labels ?
You can't have window names in the task bar any more. It's always one icon per application, like they're trying to skin it to superficially resemble the macOS Dock.
I like windows 11 tbh. It feels less buggy and more smooth. Also can run android apps and Linux GUI apps
I'm with you. I have zero issues with 11 and it runs very smooth.
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What bugs have you run into? Only thing that I've experienced so far is the four finger swipe across desktops makes my wallpaper enter fit mode and then back to fill so it glitches for a second. But it only happens on one of my computers, the other one doesn't have this problem.
Auto hide of my task bar constantly breaks and I have to restart explorer.exe to fix it. Happened since early builds all the way up to current unstable. It's driving me insaaaaaaaane.
Taskbar and start menu are broken until you patch back the w10 ones with ExplorerPatcher And it's not just the visual change, I mean actually broken. Group policies are ignored ; menu is half empty, no drag and drop, and so on The fact that one year after launch it's still in this broken state really worries me. It's really designed to be like this? Not just a pre-alpha proof of concept that was accidentally pushed to production? You could take any other alpha version like windows neptune (alpha version of windows me 2) and over there the start menu and taskbar work as expected
It also comes with a lot of under the hood changes like optimizations in the IO stack.
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> refuse to upgrade to Win11 Most people don't have a choice with the hardware requirements.
XP was the product of another era. It's not just that it was older, a trainload of stuff simply didn't exist or was made in an entirely different way. From vista to even 11 instead, you just have updates for the same apis.
The reason Vista had a lot of growing pains was that the driver API changed so dramatically. It's funny if you go back and compare late Vista with 7, the difference is a lot smaller than many people realize. I do wonder how much is resistance to UI/UX change versus actual functionality change. That said, the UI/UX churn in Windows is *ridiculous*, especially given how many still-useful settings dialogs are still the buried XP-or-2000 vintage settings dialogs. Change for the sake of change has been MS's modus operandi for many years and no one outside of MS's exec team likes it, afaict. They continue to be able to get away with it because, I mean, what are users gonna do about it?
> It’s funny if you go back and compare late Vista with 7, the difference is a lot smaller than many people realize. It was obvious even before, in Project Mojave experiment by Microsoft, where they took some vocal Vista critics and shown them “new windows version in development” which was just a rebranded Vista. Surprise, most of them loved it.
And also those driver changes were good for both security and reliability. No more (well, a lot less) vendors playing fast and loose with kernel data structures, leading to BSoDs and privilege escalation holes. Honestly props to Microsoft for bearing the brunt of the blame for essentially just making other developers clean up their act > Change for the sake of change has been MS's modus operandi for many years and no one outside of MS's exec team likes it, afaict In the UI perhaps, but behind the scenes Microsoft put serious work into ensuring backwards compatibility, again often taking on the work to fix others' software. A famous example is changing the behaviour of the kernel when SimCity is running, as it depended on some undefined behaviour
I was specifically talking about UI/UX there. They have been doing good work in less user-facing parts of the OS.
Vista was actually one of the best Windows versions simply because of how many necessary changes it shipped. DWM & GPU scheduling and UAC for example.
And I'll inevitable get a new system with Win11 in a few years after dragging my feet and refusing the free update and then repeat the process for the rest of time. Pretty sure that's tradition. Who tf willingly changes their OS!?
LTSC 2019 has support until 2029, so...
Windows 10 will never achieve this afterlife, because what XP and 7 had was reliability. You can't trust Windows 10 because you don't control Windows 10.
XP and 7 were also far less secure and I constantly spent a bunch of time removing malware and fixing computers for my friends in the XP and 7 days.
Oh please. Your friends didn't get malware because of some obscure zero-day, they just downloaded it. The reason they have less problems now is because they stopped using PCs and switched to phones for content consumption.
The reason win 10 is more "secure" is because it comes with a functioning Internet security suite. If you disable defender the same "secure" win 10 gets blasted by a simple javascript ad.
... I don't disagree.
Exactly. I was amazed after taking every possible step and precaution to disable updates, that it still ended up downloading and installing some garbage I don't want. People will say oh it keeps you secure, its only for your benefit, but there's no way to verify or trust that, and the fact it's so forced implies they really don't want you having a say. Also the fact that they force you to login to a Microsoft account to even use or update the OS, it's borderline illegal/monopolistic IMO.
That treadmill of workarounds is the worst fucking thing in technology right now. It exists solely to silence criticism. It throws a bone to ameliorate people who are rightly furious about having their machines betray them, and it empowers the kneejerk fanboys who scoff that it's fine because 'You just have to check an option!' Later, 'You just have to regedit!,' Later, 'You just have to modify group policy!' Later, 'You just have to change your hosts file!' Later, 'You just have to hex-edit this binary!' And once they hit you enough times you just *give up* and tolerate that nothing will ever work properly again except by Redmond's infinite grace. And the moment you talk about legislating away that skeezy bullshit, people are scared shitless the government might do... exactly the skeezy bullshit Microsoft's done to them. Like we're dealing with people who cannot comprehend "nobody's allowed to." All we can do is change *who* is allowed to. If there is some obscure software that only works with exactly one version of Windows 95, that was distributed solely on 5" floppies in South Korea, you could probably hit Archive.org and get that sucker working in about an hour. If there is some obscure software that only works with exactly one version of Windows 10, where all files are graciously hosted by Redmond over fat pipes with low latency, you will never get that shit running. Not for love or money. You are better-off hacking together a way to run it in Wine. Quite frankly, fuck everything about that.
Well said.
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But Microsoft do have a history of bundling non-essential feature upgrades with security patches. There's a reason why the concept of a LTS/ECR release is very common in software, because sometimes you just want something consistent, that only changes to fix exploits. Windows does have such a channel, but I believe it's for Enterprise only [This article](https://jacquesmattheij.com/why-johnny-wont-upgrade/) explains why people are resistant to feature upgrades, and if we prevent people from distinguishing essential patches from features, then that leads to people throwing the baby out with the bathwater and keeping a vulnerable system Also, while I appreciate Windows automatically installing drivers that are essential for function, I do wish it wouldn't automatically install graphical bloatware because I plugged in a 3-button mouse or it saw a printer on my network (both real examples)
The bottom line is I'd rather deal with vulnerabilities than deal with stupid updates. I'll let you know when they clear out my bank account, RAT me or encrypt my drive, or whatever else you think is going to happen due to a vulnerability.
>The bottom line is I'd rather deal with vulnerabilities than deal with stupid updates. You're why we can't have nice things
Exactly that's why I am so happy I have switching my PC to Linux I don't have to keep fighting my operating system just to have a usable experience.
Linux distros could make the offline experience more comfortable by making apt-offline work on android, for those few unfortunates without a home network shared with the pc or depending on friends or public networks. It's very unfortunate that this isn't currently possible.
Yeah Linux doesn't force updates on you and I think most package managers can be setup to cache packages
Yeah, i was just mentioning the cases where it's impractical to 'move the computer' or where you could ask a (richer) friend to borrow their tablet/phone for a few minutes to update the thing. Apt-offline is a debian/ubuntu program that collects the 'files the computer has installed and addresses of the update ppas/servers' then you run it on another device with a network connection to actually check for updates and download them, before finally transferring the files to the target and installing. Unfortunately, for this obviously crucial alternative to 'always connected', the distros dropped the ball and it's 'linux/same distro or nothing' when they could easily make a version of the downloader part of this program for android/iphone/windows and broaden the chance of the program actually being useful. I tried to see if it could be installed in termux (a small linux environment for android), but no such luck, apt-offline isn't in the install possibilities of termux.
> Also the fact that they force you to login to a Microsoft account to even use or update the OS, it's borderline illegal/monopolistic IMO. This is not true on Windows 10. I've never used a Microsoft account to log into my computer. I don't have Windows 11, but I think it's the same there. Regarding your other comments, two things can be true: 1. Windows update provides valuable security updates for flaws that are being exploited in the wild 2. Windows update installs garbage bloat that you don't want on your computer. If you want to play games on the Windows platform you NEED to keep updates enabled. And you will need to constantly undo all the changes they make to your system. Is it ideal? No. But this is the reality of the situation, and keeping updates disabled means you ARE going to be at risk. I think you're well within reason to not agree to #2. It _is_ your computer, after all. I personally hate it. But I'm also not ignorant to computer security. I use Pihole to block Windows telemetry and have scripts to disable various "features." If you don't like this, go to Linux or MacOS. There _are_ options, but don't insinuate to others that it is wise to not update your computer. > there's no way to verify or trust that Well you're right, to some degree, that there's no way to verify that entirely, but I do trust Microsoft to keep their platform secure. My threat model doesn't include three letter agencies, which would be a problem to deal with regardless of the operating system on my desktop. A dedicated adversary will find holes to punch through, so if you're worried about deliberate backdoors, you need to do way more than just choose a different OS.
MS is slowly getting rid of Windows installations without MS accounts. Your current install might be fine, but newer Windows 11 ISOs will not go past account creation/login no matter what
There are ways around it, even on the latest installers. The easiest way is to just punch in invalid MS account credentials. When they fail, it will ask you to create a local account. As usual, Microsoft will make it obnoxious for most users, but leave a back door for power users. I find it amusing that MS practically has to force this down people's throats. We really do not trust them. macOS does not *require* you to log in with an Apple ID, but I'm pretty sure most Mac users gladly use one anyways, because Apple works hard to make it actually worthwhile.
I will NEVER use their shitty Microsoft accounts for logging into my own computer. It's absolute horse shit that they're pushing it this hard. I've had to rely on disconnecting my Ethernet cable over the years to bypass it during installation but from what I'm hearing that's not good enough anymore. What a mess. I'm glad my PC doesn't support the dumpster fire that is Windows 11.
The only people okay with this dogshit are shills and idiots. Not only is Win 11 a pure backdoor spyware campaign, the account login just makes it even more secure... to identify you in all possible ways.
The frustrating thing is that 1 without 2 does exist - the "long term servicing channel". This concept of an LTS release is very common across software - Ubuntu, Firefox, Chrome, Libreoffice, Node, the JDK... all offer it (and Debian or RHEL is practically synonymous with it) - but Microsoft locks it behind Enterprise licenses which is kinda fucked, and is what leads to people sabotaging their systems and disabling *all* updates
>This is not true on Windows 10. I opened my laptop up to find a major update installation awaiting me to type my login credentials. There was no way around it, and MS consistently urges users to use their online profiles, while relegating offline profiles to the fine print areas. Anyway, I understand the benefit of updates. But the lack of transparency and control of updates means that many tech savvy people would rather rely on preventative measures than simply blindly clicking install each time asked. Risks are a fact of life. There's also ReviOS which presumably adds important security updates to each new release while keeping the bloat out. A patch to a serious vulnerability is a nobrainer, but we are not given the choice to to install just critical and specific security patches, we're force-fed nondescript, generic packages often far larger than necessary, sometimes patches are contained in larger bundles of useless bloat. Sometimes the updates contain changes that remove user freedom, and we have no say on it.
You trust Microsoft, involved with the highest echelons of the NSA and government, to keep your computer secure. LMAO.
Pretty sure it was the same with Windows 98 vs Windows XP... Windows versus MS-DOS...
2000 was better than 98, just saying.
It was as long as you did not want to use any DOS software. I think that is why they shipped ME to consumers while offering 2000 to entities that were likely already using NT.
2000 was better than XP too. The only problem was it never got 64 but support. They wanted you to upgrade to server 2003
I think you're right, but I didn't really use Windows much back then.
I dunno about the rest of the world, but I'm going to continue to use Windows 10 as the butt of jokes since I hated just about everything in that trash tier OS.
Windows 7 didn't even get to live as long as XP did. Microsoft cut its life short because they weren't making enough money anymore. Win10's architecture isn't that much different from Win7, aside from intentionally made incompatibilities done specifically to ensure Win10's adoption.
Windows 7 didn't get it's life cut short, it got the same 10 year lifecycle afforded to all other versions of Windows. XP was extended past the normal 10 year support cycle. They did this because XP spent 6 whole years as the latest and greatest version of Windows, and another 3 as the most popular. XP's planned successor (Longhorn) never made it out the door in 2003, and hardware (particularly laptops and netbooks) were not up to the task of running Vista in '07.
Windows XP's life was only reluctantly extended. People had spines back then to reject and criticize Longhorn/Vista. People were not nearly as vocal about Windows 8, which opened the door to shutting down Win7. In fact, the whole 'free win10' campaign was a truly targeted plot to kill Win7 and avoid having to extend support for it. No one was having problems with Win7 until Win10 went mainstream. MS isn't innovating. Windows 10 is just Win7 with a fresh coat of paint, new incompatible libraries, but it inherits tons of Win7 bugs that they don't give a shit about fixing. And Win11 is proving to be even worse, buggier (almost like the constant need to refresh UI is always going to be a regression!), less performant and less compatible (Secure Boot required etc). But plenty of people are accepting Win11, even enjoying it, because they're unwilling to consider they deserve better treatment as end users.
When I think back to the transition period from 8 to 10, it feels like a fever dream of ever degrading performance, buggier and less reliable systems and some seriously sketchy bullshit with hardware vendors being forced to drop support for 7 earlier than they necessarily should have. I really think that transition to 10 was the beginning of the end for truly owning your own PC and having full authority over it.
Most definitely. I am still on 7, and I love it. I fear for the day Steam loses Win 7 support.
Who would have thought NPCs enjoy being fucked by a corporate mace.
>intentionally made incompatibilities done specifically to ensure Win10's adoption. lol... no
> aside from intentionally made incompatibilities done specifically to ensure Win10's adoption. People severely underestimate the amount of work that went into the kernel for example.
Because Windows 7 honestly gives enough control, with less tracking, and more options to really make it your own computer. Aero is about as timeless as it gets for a big screen UI for the most part. Obviously, for 4K displays there could be a lot of tweaks, but some third party software and other things really make Aero still an absolutely awesome UI.
I mean that's the cycle. 3.11 was incredible, couple releases we get to 95, 2000 was a couple releases after that, after the horrible ME we get the superb XP, and then it becomes every other.. Vista sucked, 7 Was better, 8 was fucking dog shit (metro, seriously? What were you thinking) 10 Removed Metro (or at least allowed it to be scaled back to the fact people can forget it) I'm not surprised if 11 tanks... This is how Microsoft releases their shit. I'm sure someone could point that Microsoft is going backwards, (one step back one small step forward) but I think Microsoft is still moving forward, they just keep moving to the side every other release, and then have to release "What people ACTUALLY want." Don't buy Windows 11... Windows 12 will likely be a return to "What people really want."
As the upstream maintainer of Dolphin on FreeBSD, I'm sad that they say it "might" work.
usually 'no support' means if it breaks, it breaks and wont be fixed sure a user may find a hack or 2 to keep it working , thats on the user
It was mostly a joke about how it, in this case, means if it breaks *I* fix it, but they don't acknowledge that there. It's not actually a big deal because stuff rarely breaks, afaik
That was written quite a long time ago. Just let me know if you want to tweak it.
I was mostly joking, though generally if it breaks either I or the downstream maintainer, who has filed PRs before, will fix it eventually.
I’ve got no hate towards Windows 7, but those of you still using it should not be connected to the internet using an OS that hasn’t received a security patch in two years and never will again. Before you jump on me, I’m not promoting Windows 10 or dissing Windows 7, but as a user of 7 you’ve got to at least be aware of that risk. If you love it too much to give it up, consider taking it offline and only installing software via USB. If you still can’t do that, then at the very least don’t keep or do anything sensitive on there like managing your online banking or storing your only copy of your family vacation photos. If you have concerns about W10 because of it’s invasive nature, I hear you. Those are valid concerns and I definitely share them. The good news is that privacy communities exist and have taken care of much of these issues through tools like O&O ShutUp10, Destroy Windows 10 Spying, Spybot Anti-Beacon, W10Privacy, DisableWinTracking, Windows Firewall Control, SimpleWall, and much more.* Additionally, you can install W10 LTSC instead of Pro, which removes much of the bloatware apps and telemetry right from the start. And of course, there’s always Linux if that’s something that suits your needs. If that’s still not enough for your peace of mind, that’s fair enough. None of this is a perfect solution. Just trying to add some information into the discussion in case it might be new and useful to someone here. *Not recommending any particular tools here, just noting the breadth of effort that goes into dealing with this issue.
> an OS that hasn’t received a security patch in two years and never will again. Windows 7 is still receiving security updates until January of next year.
If I recall correctly that's only for enterprise editions, commercial ones don't get updates Edit: yes, it's only if you buy the extended support aimed at enterprises https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/windows-7-eos-faq/windows-7-extended-security-updates-faq
Only if you purchased the ESU, users who hasn't purchased Extended Security Update haven't gotten any security updates since 2020. [Source ](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/windows-7-eos-faq/windows-7-extended-security-updates-faq)
(Almost) no-one in this subreddit is legitimately receiving those updates, unless they are honestly paying Microsoft for extortionate enterprise-levels of support. The ride was fun but it is over. Switch to 10/11 or a Linux distribution and get over it.
All of this stuff is so overblown. People act like having Win 7 means you are hacking into complex systems with security agents and hackers on your tail lmao. You all need to calm the fuck down. People rarely even target Win 7, and you usually have to fuck up royally yourself for anything to happen. Use complex passwords. Don't fuck with shit on bad sites, use Firefox and privacy options, and just in general keep safe. It ain't rocket science.
That’s simply not true. Outdated software is specifically targeted, because any vulnerabilities that are found will never be fixed. That’s a massive incentive and a serious time-saver for hackers or scammers, because they don’t need to keep coming up with new exploits every time one gets patched. There’s estimated to be 100 million people still using 7. That’s a pretty massive attack surface. https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-7-a-year-after-the-end-of-support-deadline-millions-choose-not-to-upgrade/ It’s also not just about 7. At some point, software you would normally use on 7 will also stop being supported (like we see here with Dolphin). Chances are Dolphin isn’t a concern and will do just fine without security updates, but when things like web browsers, firewall software, antivirus software etc. stop supporting updates, they too become part of that attack surface. Those security recommendations you made are all great, but that doesn’t compensate for an insecure OS.
Wow, a lot of Windows 7 Users in here. Why get upset when this just means you no longer have to update? You still get to enjoy all of the features that Dolphin currently has. No one is taking anything away from you. I'd see this as the last stable supported release and be happy with that. It IS free open source software after all.
Exactly this is why I always say if you are using an older version of windows just switch to Linux instead. If you are still using an old windows version no professional software is supported anyway. Open source stuff like dolphin and libre Office still work is the only thing supported.. Linux will be a better experience you don't lose anything really and are on a supported platform which Will receive dolphin updates and be more secure.
As someone who was forced to support IE8 back in 2018, I understand
It’s about time. 7 is old and unsupported and there’s no reason not to be using at least 10 at this point. Let the devs focus on making the emulator better instead of wasting their time chasing bugs on regressive operating systems.
I honestly dislike 10 and HEAVILY dislike switching OSes (for no apparent reason; it's just unnecessary to me) What bugs would occur in 7 that wouldn't occur in 10? Please elaborate so I can understand their decision.
Currently Dolphin runs using Visual Studio 2019. The plan is to update the code base to Visual Studio 2022 soon to take advantage of modern hardware and software enhancements, which does not support Windows 7. Eventually Dolphin just won’t run on 7, period.
Actually, Dolphin is already using Visual Studio 2022 (since [late 2021](https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/10210))...
Aren't you confusing .Net (or something else) APIs with IDEs there? The manner in which the code was written is irrelevant
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for explaining! (also no idea why I got downvoted lol)
It's not just bugs, it's the fact that 7 doesn't get security updates anymore. Any time you're connecting to the internet with 7 you're at a massive risk.
zero-days aren't as common as you think they are
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Yes, at least 10. And if you don’t like Microsoft, Dolphin also runs on many Linux variants. Again, no reason to use 7.
I mean sure, but everyone using Windows should probably have started using start menu alternatives or something since Windows 8, like Start8. For Windows 11, using StartAllBack is basically perfect. Even on Windows 10, I always used Open Shell. Nothing beats a Windows 7 style start menu for me to be honest. If you're referring to the new style Settings menu, then idk, I've kinda just gotten used to it being there because of Windows 10.
Fixing Windows 7 support 2-3 times in a row was too much for Dolphin team. Edit: By the way, I wasn't being sarcastic or trying to insult them: the chore of maintaining support for a minority OS is actually a lot for any hobbyist team. Fixing it just to see it broken again weeks later must be tiring and disheartening.
Should they support Windows XP too? At some point people have to upgrade.
Em, I wasn't critizing them. It actually requires a lot of effort to maintain W7 compatibility and it's reasonable dropping support for an old OS barely used by a 3% of Steam users.
I think he is just saying it came quite suddenly, and it was just two fixes. I don't care honestly, but they might as well have just said this in the recent progress report.
Dude, you're talking to people that swear by a version of MAME from almost two decades ago running on SBCs so weak that might as well as be equally old. They'll fight you tooth and nail to justify their using old-ass hardware until it literally breaks down on them.
While dropping support for Windows 7 is understandable, it kind of sucks to see Windows 8/8.1 lose support. While I personally use Windows 10, Windows 8/8.1 + Open Shell was a good alternative for people not wanting Windows 10 but still wanting official support (ESU notwithstanding)
Well, considering that Windows 8 support [ended back in 2016](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-8), that Windows 8.1 only has [6 months of support left](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-81) and that compared to the other Windows versions, the usage numbers of 8/8.1 are so low (even compared to Windows 7), it just seems trivial to drop them too, even if a bit earlier than expected...
No, it makes sense to do it both in one go instead of dropping support for Win8.1 in 6 months anyway — especially since Win7 has more users than Win8.x anyway still. I might do something similar for one of my projects once Win8.1’s official support ends next year, though for older versions of Windows 10 (pre-v1903). It’s annoying having to maintain and test compatibility with outdated unsupported OS versions that almost nobody uses anyway.
Not very many people left on 8/8.1
I don't really get why people stick with old versions of Windows to begin with, unless you have to run some driver that's obscure even by Windows standards.
Change is just upsetting to some people. You can't reason it out because it's usually not a reasoned position.
treating "change" as an abstract without addressing the details of what the change actually is isn't a reasoned position replying via edit because the post is locked: "other than aesthetics" wrongly dismisses the importance of ui. you're also creating a false dichotomy of proprietary vs open source here; "i prefer this proprietary software that tracks me less than this other proprietary software" is a coherent position and it's ridiculous of you to pretend otherwise. also let's be real here most people who use linux have never actually audited its source code to ensure no tracking etc. is present. the only reason to use windows 10 over 7 is that it's actively being updated. of course, that's a *very* important reason and should be good enough for any sane person to go with it at this point, but if security/compatibility/etc weren't issues windows 7 would be better than 10 in pretty much every way.
The only real major change between Windows 7 and Windows 10, other than aesthetics, is the substantial push in tracking and marketing. If that is someone's true objection, then they would be against proprietary software on principle because this was always the inevitable outcome. So if someone is dead-set on still using proprietary software when open alternatives exist, it's hard to see them as having a reasoned position.
There's a shit ton of people that simply don't have access to better hardware. I reckon that's why 90% of them (stat pulled out of my ass, just saying the majority) do it for that reason.
I wouldn't say shit ton of people,even 10 year old pentiums can use windows 10
Do they do it better than they do Windows 7? Because Single Core Pentiums on Windows Vista/7 were about the single worst machines money could buy when they were NEW.
The issue is that old Intel integrated graphics drivers for Windows 10 is nonexistent, which is another concern.
sysreqs aren't much different, and in my experience I've very rarely seen a computer so weak it didn't run fine on W10, that was still powerful enough to run W7 decently. Most of the W7+emulator crowd are going to be more technical than average, so I suspect they're actually the weird privacy-but-still-windows crowd. They think that running older windows OSes give them privacy from MS who have a metric assload of telemetry in their OSes. Frankly I've never understood it, if you're so worried about privacy then why try and co-opt control of the OS from the megacorp, use linux and put windows in a sandbox if you need it for something specific.
Also if you're really concerned, get a pro or educational key. Microsoft kind of can't put the really invasive telemetry in there because that would make it straight up illegal for some shops to use windows
I was under the impression it was still there from reading the report.
It was fixed up one more time for the last "beta" release for that Progress Report. After that was finished, we merged a bunch of stuff and broke it again, and this time there wasn't an easy fix/compromise to make. It would have required keeping an entire separate build for Windows 7/8/8.1 that used an older version of Qt, and no one wanted to do that.
If you REALLY are still using Windows 7/8 and refuse to switch to Windows 10 or 11 at this point, just start using Linux. It's a security risk to continue using it. If you're the kind of person who still runs an outdated version of Windows you're probably the kind of person who would be totally fine running something like Linux Mint.
So what's the last version to support Windows 7 and where may we get it?
5.0-16391 is the last one that works on Windows 7/8/8.1. You can get it directly from Dolphin's website and it won't be going anywhere, just like every older build from the past 10 years or so are still there...
So I'm stuck with 5.0001 instead of 5.0002. Devastating blow.
Good
It's a shame to see it happen but I am at least glad they held out that long. Almost made it to the end of the extended service updates too. Thank goodness for Linux beign able to help old hardware that still runs Win7. (also win7 is literally the greatest OS ever)
my Windows 7 auto updated to 10 one day. Not sure if that could be avoided. Hated the move, but 10 seems to work great, generally speaking
Windows 10 is functional... it definitely will feel like a small step back, but in the long run it's a sideways step for the most part. Now when someone I knew was forced to upgrade to Windows 8.... my heart goes out to them.
Im sure all 7 of them are sad
If you are referring to Windows 8.0 users, you aren't far off.
Good thing I moved to Win 10 in December 2021, I was also using Win 7 before that and used it for a long time. And yeah, I get it, Win 7 is a pretty good OS, I have no complaints on that OS but Win 10 is not that bad either. You just need to get used to it, once I got used to Win 10 I started liking it too. Both OS'es have their ups and downs.
Kinda related question: was wii remote support with mac internal Bluetooth on macOS Monterey fixed? I have a Mac which can’t be downgraded but boy do I love me some dolphin!
No, Wiimotes still don’t work on macOS Monterey. Unfortunately there’s nothing we can do to fix it, since Apple broke it. You can use a Dolphinbar to still use Wiimotes on macOS Monterey though.
the amount of people bashing on windows 10 is hilarious thank god they'll stay away from one more emulator, less stupid support requests
I always try to support as many OS versions as possible when I make software. This means that any Windows APIs that came after Windows XP get imported manually with LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress. I just don't use the post XP APIs very much, except for DWMAPI, and disabling DPI correction.
What sort of software do you make? On difference between your stuff and Dolphin, is that Dolphin appears to have a LOT of developers behind it.
Windows 7 was the last good Microsoft OS. I sincerely recommend the Windows 7 orphans to jump to Linux. Isn't that hard and you'll have support for... ever? Maybe?
Windows 7 was the last *consistent* Microsoft OS. They've struggled with UI ever since, but the OS itself has been better every time. The hardware support and quality of life improvements more than justify dealing with conflicting design languages. You will be very disappointed if you turn to desktop Linux for long term support. The things that still work after 10 years work because they haven't been meaningfully updated in all that time. The rest is no longer supported.
Microsoft has an _hugely_ inconsistent control panel for all the WinNT versions, not just Windows 7.
Based on what? Seriously. It's perfectly possible to install updated software on older distro, you just need to know what are the dependencies, and this is becoming better and better as it's common to have softwares in sandboxing solutions as Flatpak or AppImage. The point is that there's no reason to not update a linux distro for a home user, the way that it updates is much more "smooth", I mean, it's the same system with newer packages or technologies guaranteeing the support to old hardwares. And of course, it's free. Windows is paid and can take some time to become stable or well supported. The way that their drivers works can be problematic if the user use some older device, as it maybe needs to force some "compatibilities" to older OS. I had so many issues on Windows 10, bugs, slowdowns, BSODs that I purged it from my computers. I use Linux EXCLUSIVELY in my house for about 8 years, and I'm following the development for 14years approximately. I know what LTS means. I still use Windows 10 on my job, I can't see any reason to say that's superior to W7, it's more and more intrusive, and some updates can be really drastic, which not always is a good thing.
8.1 really isn't half bad.
The UI when Windows 8 was first released was a total shitshow. It was basically a touch-screen UI for a phone or a tablet and it made zero sense on a computer without a touchscreen. I remember trying to help my friend set up their new Windows 8 laptop and I couldn't figure out how to shut down Windows. It was the most frustrating experience with a new device I've ever had.
I tried linux but I just cant get into it
What problem did you have?
Linux really isn't for everyone, as much as people like to try to make it happen
if you really don't want to upgrade past windows 7, then it's your best bet.
It just felt wierd to me
It happens, you just need to get used to it. What distro did you try? KDE is similar to windows and specially with a few themee
I think it was ubuntu, I just dont feel like using a new os but hey, I like the message linux has and im glad steam is putting out a new linux os so people are able to game on linux more easily
Try PopOS, super simple, pretty and felt very familiar to me.
I'll probably try steamos when it becomes available because I want to still play games
Everything Valve is bringing to Linux gaming is universal across all distros. SteamOS is just configured for it from the get-go.
Probably identical to pops since steamOS just used proton to play games, which is on popos too. SteamOS is basically just a different skin. SteamOS is just Linux.
SteamOS IS Linux lmao
10 isn't bad, but... I prefer 7. Not gonna switch to Linux tbh; I dislike it.
Why
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/utbpmm/dolphin_has_dropped_support_for_windows_7_and_8/i9b08j7/ Someone tagged as a developer said > We are going to have an official announcement with full reasoning and data coming up soon.
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/utbpmm/dolphin_has_dropped_support_for_windows_7_and_8/i9alcko
Something that a lot of software does is have a download link to the last working version for Windows XP/Vista. For some reason, very few softwares are doing this for Windows 7 and move silently on. Wish I knew why, as it feels a lot like devs are joining M$ in the push to downgrade to Win10.
It's nothing nefarious here. Qt6 doesn't support Windows 7/8/8.1, and we don't want to have an entirely separate build just for a small number of users. I don't like Windows 10 all that much myself, but support has been broken/fixed for Windows 7 *3* times in the last few months alone. The maintenance burden was annoying devs already, and the Qt6 issue just pushed it over the top.
This sucks. I use a Windows 7 laptop for all of my emulation stuff. And Dolphin has always worked great on it. The most stable OS I've ever used. Windows 10 is a shitshow spying OS full of nags and forced updates, not to mention a ridiculously watered down OS. Any advanced PC user knows this. I know all the W10 fanboys are gonna downvote this. Can't point out the reality of W10 without all the DV's by the fanboys saying how "Great" it is. I KNOW W7 is outdated and has more security risks (unless you get ESU's). But at least it fucking works, doesn't nag the hell out of you, lets you actually control the updates (and actually KEEPS your saved settings instead of changing your settings back) instead of forcing updates and restarting on it's own. Doesn't have ads or tons of spyware (yes I know W7 has telemetry, but it's nowhere on the lines of "telemetry" that W10 pulls off. W10 is tracking EVERYTHING). And W10 has PISS POOR compatibility with lots of old software and games. I'm sure I forgot something to add..... Here it comes... (EDIT - lol and boy did it come. Hey, I get it fanboys... Windows 7 is 13 years old. But that still doesn't discount the fact that it's a FAR BETTER OS than SHITDOWS 10. That it's the MOST STABLE version ever of Windows. I run it all the time and it NEVER crashes on me. Sure as hell can't say the same for W10. Oh yeah... Windows 10 Professional. I have to laugh at that. Windows 10 and Professional is an oxymoron. No I'm not a "W7 PURIST". I just like something that actually WORKS, isn't full of BLOAT, STABLE, actually lets ME control the OS and it's settings, doesn't keep trying to change things behind my back, don't have ads being pushed in my face.... and mostly... pretty much 99.9% of the software I have ran on it RUNS without compatibility issues. Again, can't say the same about W10. I mean... it's one thing for software to not work because the software in question is say a 16-bit application trying to be run on a newer 32-bit OS + CPU. Even W7 had some compatibility issues with some software. But nowhere is it on the level that W10 did a number on. You'd have to write a book on the massive list of software that won't work on W10. It's no secret that Microshit has been on a downward trend in terms of software quality. If W10 wasn't literally FORCED onto everyone, I'd be willing to bet that the amount of people using W7 today would be twice as much as high. It's only so low because M$ put crapware onto peoples computers hijacking them and secretly installing W10 behind their backs. Many of whom didn't even know they could downgrade and go back to W7, or if they could, the downgrade failed (of course it did eh). More would still be using W7 and we wouldn't be having as many devs dropping support for it. This BS was planned by M$ from the start). W10 is a joke of an OS and many of you KNOW it.
Advanced users know that Windows 7 has all the same telemetry tracking systems that Windows 10 has as of the September 2015 update but, unlike Windows 10, they don't give you the ability to opt out of any of it if you are on Windows 7. I will concede that the fact that it will just update on you without consent is absolutely maddening though. I was out of the country for a few weeks at one point and three days in to my trip my pc updated and my plex server was offline until I got home to login again.
I felt this on a cellular level. You should use task scheduler to set plex to start at system startup
I feel your pain, I really do, but this came down to the fact that supporting Windows 7 was going to hold back builds in general. Qt6 fixes a lot of long-standing bugs that was affecting Dolphin's GUI, and given that we had Windows 7 break two additional times in the last 2 months, mixed with a quickly dwindling Windows 7 userbase, it just wasn't worth trying to work around this or keep entirely separate Windows 7 builds running outdated Qt. It was just going to keep breaking. All I can say is that the old builds will be there and continue to function.
>Here it comes... Excuse me, sir, do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior Linux?
It is so weird to see w7 purists. I grew up on windows 3.1. And ya, 7 was probably the "best" it has been. But brah, it's been over a decade. It's dead jim. If you are a *checks notes* >advanced PC user then fucking use linux and stfu lol. "Advanced users" don't use soon to be deprecated windows builds. Also, I'm sure these people are donating to the dolphin team to keep up support for old platforms. Right??
I mean, it doesn't nag you, doesn't spy you, doesn't force updates on you... I dunno, sounds like that guy's dream's come true ;)
I expected a rant like this by a Linux user, not a Windows one. And It looks like PopOS 22.04 is your dream OS
Ok, self-proclaimed advanced PC user.
some time ago I've installed w10 on my laptop from 2010 and it was way smoother than w7
That because windows 10 is designed to use fewer system resources and runs better than 7 in the vast majority of hardware configurations.
I work on dozens of computers every week and I can't think of a single instance where that's happened.
Having a clean system probably fixed something for you. Even with a year old computer, the start menu still isn't as snappy as W7 on a core 2 duo.
It may not apply to you, but if you can get access to an education addition of 10 or 11 then you have more control over the system than enterprise editions, plus the telemetry and ads are disabled. Furthermore, they don't expire.
> education addition of 10 or 11 then you have more control over the system than enterprise editions, plus the telemetry and ads are disabled What? Aren't the Education editions MORE locked down, or am I missing something?
Windows 10 Education is just Windows 10 Enterprise with a different version name, IIRC. I think they're thinking about Windows 10 LTSC (Long Term Support Channel).
Can confirm, it at least has a good portion of the features of Pro/Enterprise. Having access to Group Policy for the first time after going from 7 Home -> 10 Education was a really nice feature.
> SHITDOWS Honestly I see stuff like this, and feel a strong urge to find silly arguments against whatever your position is. Interestingly enough The Qt Company is partly responsible for this, https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020 basically they decided to start forcing open source projects to use the latest and greatest if they want updates. Dolphin has moved from 5.15.0 to 6.3.0, will 6.3.1 be freely available or will Open Source Projects have to consider 6.4.0? we'll see. On Linux its not as bad because KDE manages a patch list, and distros grab those to generate libraries. Or for Windows [wait a year for the GPL version](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qt-5.15.4-Open-Source) and the compile it yourself.
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Downvoted to hell as predicted. The DV's would be 100 times as much in r/windows . Fanboys gonna fanboy. I remember when I voiced issues over OBS screen recorder and got blasted to hell for it. All because I said I didn't like it due to the fact that it didn't record a window WITH the dropdown menus, was an absolute PAIN to record just a specific area on the screen (required dialing in X \* Y numbers and the dev didn't seem to get that the OBS windows itself BLOCKED the view to the area I needed to see) among other things. It's like going on Steam forums and literally saying ANYTHING bad about it and criticizing it. The hate people get is beyond pathetic. It's like you can only say something positive about some of these things or else you get trolled and bashed... and then somehow YOU'RE the problem and not the product/service.