Windows 7 still getting support and security updates? Well, Microsoft Confirms Extended Support Option for Windows 7.

[aezakmi]

oh man these microtransactions are everywhere nowadays I mean imagine paying for an update lmao

[aezakmi]

5 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Play on Linux. No fiddling with terminal, basically idiot proof.....

BF5 on Linux? Pressing X to doubt...

it can't even run BF3 which is a seven year old game, or fallout 4, hell you can't even play league of legends with linux

 

yes it's a great OS but it's simply not meant for gaming, you can play some games on it but that's not the purpose of the OS

[jagdtigger]

9 minutes ago, Void Master said:

@jagdtigger Some games are not compatible with Linux

btw everyone has an opinion. so, it is better to let this down Please !!!!

More precisely their good for nothing DRM is... Well lets hope linux gaming takes up the pace.

[mynameisjuan]

1 minute ago, jagdtigger said:

More precisely their good for nothing DRM is... Well lets hope linux gaming takes up the pace.

Steam is flooded with linux supported games because Steam link. AAA games are really the only devs who dont give a shit about linux.

[Void Master]

1 minute ago, jagdtigger said:

12 minutes ago, Void Master said:

@jagdtigger Some games are not compatible with Linux

btw everyone has an opinion. so, it is better to let this down Please !!!!

More precisely their good for nothing DRM is... Well lets hope linux gaming takes up the pace.

Agree , Linux is a light weight OS ,that will help in fps games.

[jagdtigger]

3 minutes ago, mynameisjuan said:

Steam is flooded with linux supported games because Steam link. AAA games are really the only devs who dont give a shit about linux.

AFAIK Doom is/was a AAA game and it has linux version, so does Witcher 2, Talos Principle, etc...

[mynameisjuan]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

AFAIK Doom is/was a AAA game and it has linux version, so does Witcher 2, Talos Principle, etc...

Still a drop in the bucket to other AAA games that dont support it. Still there are tons of games that support linux just fine. 

 

Origin, EA, battlenet need to just their heads out of their arse

[Void Master]

2 minutes ago, mynameisjuan said:

4 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

AFAIK Doom is/was a AAA game and it has linux version, so does Witcher 2, Talos Principle, etc...

Still a drop in the bucket to other AAA games that dont support it. Still there are tons of games that support linux just fine. 

 

Origin, EA, battlenet need to just their heads out of their arse

Agree

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

2 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

If you want to see that Windows 10 is the least secure Windows OS ever, and how the security of all modern Windows OS' has degraded severely since Satya Nadella became Microsoft's CEO, check out this post:

B ... bu ... but ... but Microsoft's marketing chief said that people who continue to use Win7 are doing so "at their own risk" and that Windows 10 is a safer better operating system. 

 

timestamped to 27:43, goes on until 31:20-ish

 

[Master Delta Chief]

2 hours ago, aezakmi said:

oh man these microtransactions are everywhere nowadays I mean imagine paying for an update lmao

Keep in mind that this extended support + updates are meant for enterprises, not for the average consumers. Though indeed, there's a part of me that says paying for an update ain't right but it's for an operating system which MS doesn't focus a lot on anymore. 

[Commodus]

5 hours ago, Sauron said:

And that's why nobody uses Apple stuff in an enterprise environment 

 

The cure isn't a kick out the door, it's open source - but Microsoft will never accept that.

 

Besides, you complain about companies wanting to stick with the same thing forever - but have you seen the consumers in this thread and others? It's not just companies, people in general are nostalgic and fear change. It's ridiculous to think of windows 7 as an "alternative" to windows 10 - it's just an old version of the same thing. And yet, despite most of the changes that anyone cares about being cosmetic or superficial, there's a whole movement around "resisting" windows 10 in favour of the more familiar 7, ignoring the flaws it had and still has because it's what they're used to. You're not "sticking it" to Microsoft if you use their product from 10 years earlier, you're still fueling their monopoly - which is the reason why they can get away with whatever they want in a new windows release. They know that you aren't going anywhere.

They do use Apple, but it's usually client computers that aren't running some deeply entrenched tool.  I certainly know what you mean, though!  You don't usually see Macs in server rooms, or in client spaces where they expect to use the same app for 20 years (security and modernity be damned).  Open source would help, but of course Microsoft would have to figure out a way to do that without ruining a giant source of revenue.

 

I've definitely seen those home users who cling firmly to old versions of Windows at all costs, and I never quite get it.  It's like they hope Microsoft will suddenly "see the light" and eliminate everything that they, personally, don't like about Windows 10.  Or act as if NVIDIA and Intel have some kind of moral obligation to keep releasing Windows 7 drivers for every new piece of hardware.  You don't have to like everything that Microsoft does, but good gawd... learning to move on is an important life skill, folks.

[Sauron]

7 minutes ago, Commodus said:

They do use Apple, but it's usually client computers that aren't running some deeply entrenched tool.  I certainly know what you mean, though!  You don't usually see Macs in server rooms, or in client spaces where they expect to use the same app for 20 years (security and modernity be damned).  Open source would help, but of course Microsoft would have to figure out a way to do that without ruining a giant source of revenue.

Enterprise customers will gladly pay for support even on a foss system, as proven by red hat, suse and oracle. Consumer OS sales aren't what makes MS money and most consumers won't sit there and compile windows just to avoid paying for it (not to mention piracy is a thing regardless). Sure, it would make stuff like wine a little easier to make - but that's not a real threat for them.

[HashBrowns]

19 hours ago, EPENEX said:

Windows 7 is an outdated poorly made OS.

Been using Windows 7 64-bit pro since 2010 or so (got a free key from my college's dreamspark). Never, EVER had an issue with it. I take that back, the only issue I had was trying to get WNDA3000 drivers working for my wifi netgear adapter. Which I did some googling and got that worked out (this was 5~ years ago)

 

 Aero theme is amazeballs (much better than W10's flat UI imo).  To say it's a "poorly made OS" is being borderline willfully ignorant imo.

 

 

[ZacoAttaco]

16 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

I just laughed out loud...... Did you look into any win10 support thread? Its a freaking bugfest compared to 7.

My start menu doesn't work half the time. It's ok though, it's not like the start menu is core part of the Windows OS or anything.

 

Not to mention wasn't there a story on WAN a while ago that the US NAVY still uses XP? And that they've paid for long term support for it...Anyone recall?

 

What I don't like about 10 is how conflicted it is, you have PC Settings and Control Panel, you have some new design and some old, it's not a very universal design language. If anyone's interested in more info on this TechAltar did an interesting video on the topic. Even if he tries to explain it still makes the user experience worse.

 

 

[bimmerman]

Nice. I'm still on windows 7, don't plan to change that for this PC. Don't see any point to go to 10 until I'm building a new PC.

[Void Master]

I love Win 7 and nobody can change that .It is a damn great OS.

So, who agrees?

 

[LAwLz]

On 9/8/2018 at 8:40 AM, EPENEX said:

Windows 7 is an outdated poorly made OS. It's just a slightly less bloated version of Vista which everyone knows wasn't good. I really can't wait for this OS to die, I wish it would come sooner.

Got any examples of how Windows 7 is a "poorly made OS"?

The fact that you say Windows 7 was just a "slightly less bloated" version of Vista tells me you know very little about Windows.

Also, Vista wasn't really that bad. It was MUCH better than XP in a lot of areas.

 

 

22 hours ago, Sauron said:

In fact, the only reason windows still has the freaking registry is retrocompatibility - when they drop support for older version it's entirely possible they'll get rid of it entirely.

Not sure if those two sentences are meant to be linked, but removing the registry would have no impact on Windows 7 compatibility. If newer programs stopped using the registry then it just means fewer programs would read/write to it in Windows 7. Programs would still be compatible unless Microsoft introduced some non-standard "Registry 2.0" which functioned the same way but had a different structure for no reason.

 

22 hours ago, Sauron said:

Even now quite a few features of modern hardware aren't supported in windows 7. It doesn't even support NVME boot. As I said, eventually you'll have to switch to 10 or use something other than windows unless you want to cripple your machine.

Windows 7 supports NVMe boot.

I get your point but NVMe boot is not the best example you could have made. Just saying.

 

 

 

20 hours ago, Sauron said:

What if I told you the reason windows advances at a snail's pace are people who insist on using an obsolete system until the day it is wrestled out of their corpse's hands? Windows 10 is MS' attempt to move past that and get everyone on a rolling release system that doesn't need you to do anything to stay up to date with the new features. I don't like windows as a whole either, but the approach of sticking to 7 or 8.1 only makes it worse.

The reason it is advancing at a snail's pace isn't because companies need backwards compatibility. 

It's because Microsoft have had a monopoly and no drive to improve things. Now that they are feeling competition they are starting to change things up, and in doing so they are showing how utterly incompetent they are when it comes to making good product.

 

They aren't trying to improve anything for their customers. Almost all their changes are to try and make more money, often at the expense of their customers' experience. Shoving ads into every nook and cranny. Pushing paid services and the XaaS model whenever possible. Deliberately working against cross-platform compatibility to lock people into Windows. The list goes on.

If GNU/Linux had 40% market share then we would have seen hell of a lot more progress from Microsoft, so don't try and push the blame on their customers.

 

 

19 hours ago, Sauron said:

They have a monopoly because users give it to them, that doesn't mean they aren't under pressure from developers and corporate clients to improve (at least certain parts of) their OS. Again, sticking to an old version of windows doesn't make their monopoly any less severe.

They actually have a monopoly because they used to use several illegal business methods and practices to kill competitors. Things such as bribes, Embrace, extend, and extinguish, FUD campaigns, blackmailing and deliberately breaking compatibility with competing solutions.

[Sniperfox47]

On 9/8/2018 at 9:29 AM, Sauron said:

I'm not sure you realize that I don't get to make that decision. Crap or not, we get what MS wants us to get. Also yes, there are new additions in Windows 10 APIs (you can read all about them here) and their number will increase steadily, even if you don't consider DX 12.

Umm did you actually look at that list? *Very* few of those have any meaningful implications for Win32 apps outside the Windows Store. Even those that do have absolutely no benefit in a game setting. And even if you wanted to use them for no particular reason they can just get stubbed out on earlier versions of Windows.

 

DX11 isn't going anywhere for game developers. It's still probably going to be targeted for a *loooooooooooooong* time even if everyone is on Windows 10. Even if you're using a prebuilt engine (i.e. Unity or Unreal) getting a high performance DX12 implimentation is more work than just clicking export. In a lot of cases these engines will actually perform better with DX11 unless you do a deep dive to manually optomize the pipeline for your game's specific use case.

 

And because of where DX11 is in terms of driver maturity if they do release a new "D3D 13" down the road it'll most likely be about the same as the changes between D3D 10 and 11. That is to say basically a new feature level and some tiny API changes that can be stubbed out (see DXUP if you want an idea of just how little changed between D3D 10 and 11).

 

On 9/8/2018 at 9:29 AM, Sauron said:

Of course they could have, but why would they? There's a new Windows version out that supports nvme boot out of the box, why would they bother adding it to an old release? Driver injection is just a workaround, it may not work on every motherboard and you'll need workarounds for more and more things as manufacturers drop support for 7.

Windows 7 doesn't magically lack support for any of that stuff. NVMe drivers can be installed in Windows 7 without issue after install and it can then be cloned to an NVMe drive and bootloader repaired. The *only* reason it doesn't work at install time is because the drivers are missing off the install DVD.

 

And secret tip here, low level IO drivers haven't changed meaningfully since Windows Vista so there's a *very* good chance you can just take a Windows 10 NVMe driver and load it into Windows 7 and it'll just work.

 

On 9/8/2018 at 9:29 AM, Sauron said:

What if I told you the reason windows advances at a snail's pace are people who insist on using an obsolete system until the day it is wrestled out of their corpse's hands? Windows 10 is MS' attempt to move past that and get everyone on a rolling release system that doesn't need you to do anything to stay up to date with the new features. I don't like windows as a whole either, but the approach of sticking to 7 or 8.1 only makes it worse.

Umm what? How does people not adopting the latest OS prevent them from rolling out meaningful new APIs? Again on older OSes they can just get stubbed out. And even if they don't get stubbed out the community will work around it. VKD3D for example let's you run DX12 games on Windows 7 via Vulkan.

 

If you think platform fragmentation hurts development cycles I'd urge you to look at Android. There are many devices still rocking 5 or 6 year old OS versions and yet Android provides consistent iterations on its design on par with iOS which doesn't have the fragmentation issues. Hell they've basically rebuilt their entire System side infrastructure (ART replacing DVM, the Treble kernel interface, all of the SELinux changes to secure the OS, massive changes to the ways scheduling is handled, etc.).

 

Win32 hasn't seen major iteration on its design since Windows 7 not because of fragmentation but because their focus on their platform has come in the form of UWP. That side of things has seen massive changes and likely won't see massive changes because there's really not much more to add.

 

On 9/8/2018 at 9:29 AM, Sauron said:

Because it was, at least on release - it required insane specs (for the time) to run properly and even then it was prone to crashes and weird problems. Even if it got better years later that doesn't excuse the terrible state it was released in. 7, on release, was significantly better than 2006 vista and even if it was slightly less mature than sp2 vista it came out at a time where the specs of most computers were much more up to the task. Vista earned its reputation as a rushed and terrible release and it doesn't deserve to be defended.

Umm what? You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Windows Vista had a "terrible state it was released in" due to no fault of Vista itself. It was a *massive* departure from XP using their new kernel and an entirely new driver infrastructure. It was crashy and buggy specifically because no OEMs initially got off their ass to properly develop drivers for this new infrastructure and just added cheap wrappers to their XP drivers that were unreliable and unstable.

 

If Windows did the same thing with Windows 10 and decided that they were going to kill their existing stable driver ABI and introduce a new one from scratch they'd have the exact same problems. Wait... Didn't they do that? Weren't there a large number of driver compatibility issues with graphics cards when Windows 10 first launched because they made changes to DXGI and the driver infrastructure? No couldn't be. /s

 

There was really nothing particularly rushed about Vista on Microsoft's end. They held up their side of the development and delaying it further wouldn't have magically encouraged OEMs to spend man-hours to develop proper drivers for a kernel that had no market share yet. A lot of OEMs at the time were expecting it to die just as hard as 2000 had.

On 9/8/2018 at 9:29 AM, Sauron said:

And vista's release was definitely a low point for windows.

Umm Vistas release was literally the point where Windows became what is modern Windows... No release since has offered as many changes all at once to reshape the OS.

 

Unless you need really low latency audio for some reason or need the Windows Store for some other asinine reason, Windows 10 really has nothing to offer you as a game dev over Windows 8.1, 8, 7, or even Vista.

[ScratchCat]

19 hours ago, ZacoAttaco said:

My start menu doesn't work half the time. It's ok though, it's not like the start menu is core part of the Windows OS or anything.

 

Not to mention wasn't there a story on WAN a while ago that the US NAVY still uses XP? And that they've paid for long term support for it...Anyone recall?

 

What I don't like about 10 is how conflicted it is, you have PC Settings and Control Panel, you have some new design and some old, it's not a very universal design language.

 

From my own experience, reinstalling Windows to a working state and then taking a disk image is the best option, just restore the original state from the image and load over all your data from a conventional backup. It's much simpler than trying to actually fix the issue.

 

If it isn't in a changing environment and is not connected to the Internet it can run DOS for I care. Maybe it even is preferable to use a basic OS simply for the stability which comes with reduced complexity.

 

The Settings menu has been there since 2012 (Windows 8) and still can't be used to manage System Images or properly handle program removal. Function may be better than Form but Windows 10 has neither.

[ScratchCat]

10 hours ago, LAwLz said:

It's because Microsoft have had a monopoly and no drive to improve things. Now that they are feeling competition they are starting to change things up, and in doing so they are showing how utterly incompetent they are when it comes to making good product.

What competition? Correct me if I am wrong but Mac OS isn't much of a threat for now despite it's growing market share due to the cost of the products and the hurdle of changing platforms and Linux is only now gaining ground (slightly) with Vulkan and various DX -> Vulkan translators in the gaming sector while for enterprises the switch can be tricky to say the least.

 

The main competition seems to currently lie in the 2 in 1/Tablet with keyboard market where iOS, Windows and Chrome OS are vying for customers however that is more a implementation battle where Windows and it's compatibility is only an asset.

 

The graph below does show a shrinking marketshare trend but at a gradient so slight it would take a decade to bring about changes.

[Sauron]

17 hours ago, LAwLz said:

They actually have a monopoly because they used to use several illegal business methods and practices to kill competitors. Things such as bribes, Embrace, extend, and extinguish, FUD campaigns, blackmailing and deliberately breaking compatibility with competing solutions.

Sure, but in the end the only ones who can take it away are their customers.

[LAwLz]

7 hours ago, ScratchCat said:

What competition? Correct me if I am wrong but Mac OS isn't much of a threat for now despite it's growing market share due to the cost of the products and the hurdle of changing platforms and Linux is only now gaining ground (slightly) with Vulkan and various DX -> Vulkan translators in the gaming sector while for enterprises the switch can be tricky to say the least.

 

The main competition seems to currently lie in the 2 in 1/Tablet with keyboard market where iOS, Windows and Chrome OS are vying for customers however that is more a implementation battle where Windows and it's compatibility is only an asset.

 

The graph below does show a shrinking marketshare trend but at a gradient so slight it would take a decade to bring about changes.

They are feeling competition from mobile devices. That's the reason why they focused so much on mobile for a while, and then when that attempt died they started showing a bunch of mobile focused stuff into Windows.

Windows 10 would have been very different if iOS and Android hadn't existed.

 

 

49 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Sure, but in the end the only ones who can take it away are their customers.

Not really. The government could have taken it away from them as well, like they were planning to back when Microsoft were constantly breaking the law.

Microsoft actually got sentence into breaking up into two separate companies in a US court, but the sentence was overruled.

 

But while you are technically correct that "only customers can take it away", it does put the responsibility on the victims rather than the perpetrator. The big problem with that is that Microsoft is in a position where people are locked in to using their products, because of compatibility and other issues which Microsoft themselves created. It's like saying only hookers can prevent abuse from pimps, by stop being hookers, and then ignoring all the underlying issues and the abusive relationships.

 

(In before "did you just say Microsoft is as bad as an abusive pimp!?". It's an analogy. If you think that's what I am saying then look up what analogy means).