Steam has now officially stopped supporting Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.::95.57 percent of surveyed Steam users are already on Windows 10 and 11, with nearly 2 percent of the remainder on Linux and 1.5 percent on Mac — so we may be talking about fewer than 1 percent of users on these older Windows builds. Older versions of MacOS will also lose support on February 15th, just a month and a half from now. Correction: It’s macOS 10.13 and 10.14 that are losing support. Not macOS period.
This is the sole reason my gaming rig is now running on Ubuntu. I have never had Linux on my personal computer before but since I was forced to update the OS anyway, I thought might aswell give Linux a shot.
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Didn’t stop me from gaming on 7 either. I was only gaming on my windows partition so I didn’t worry too much about vulns. Nothing in 8-11 interests me so I thought I’d try all my gaming in Linux and have been blown away by how good it is. I ran 7 up until last April and the cracks had finally started to show.
The cracks were probably because you were part of a botnet for using an insecure OS for years lol
It was mainly due to qt dropping support (used by OBS, I could have stayed on an old version) and Steam for the same reason but Chromium. I probably could have kept my old computer and stayed on 7 for longer if I wanted to.
Nice job ignoring the very real possibility that your computer has been part of a botnet for years. The botnet thanks you for your service.
I did ignore it, literally didn’t read it. You have to run code or data from untrusted sources (or be available on a network) to get exploited, and I know that computer wasn’t doing anything high bandwidth otherwise it would affect my gaming. I literally only played games on the install for a couple hours a night and my browser and other software was up to date.
Congrats on joining Linux squad!
Linux gaming got waaaaay better than in before times. Also, the system itself is a miracle for someone coming from Windows. I remember that feeling. It’s correct :)
Oh I’m very aware, I’ve been running Linux in one way or another for 20 years :)
Ah, great! Should be like at home then :)
I’ve never felt more at home! No separate machines, no dualbooting, my games run great :D
They do!
It’s great that Linux is a feasible alternative nowadays. But it’s not like you are using Ubuntu 10.04 from 2010, right? OSs get outdated and stop being supported. That’s just the way it is.
Out of curiosity (I no longer run win 7 at all so can’t check), does this mean steam will give an error if you try to run it on win 7 and will refuse to run? Or is this just valve saying they are no longer committed to releasing any updates for win 7? Or a combination of the two where they aren’t deliberately making it incompatible, but they also aren’t deliberately making it compatible so some patch is expected to break it entirely, maybe even today?
End of support means no more security updates. MS already ended support for Win 7 which has numerous unpatched vulnerabilities.
Steam is basically a DRM system which means you won’t be able to run any of your existing games on Windows 7/8. It will break all your steam games either immediately or within days.
Citation needed…
No big. Just run everything in compatibility mode and pick Windows 10 or 11.
/s
Pro tip, set it to Windows 12 so you don’t have to worry for another decade or more
Please, that’s rookie terms.
Set it to 98, you won’t have to worry about it again for like, a century.
Get this set it to 2000, not even your great grand kids will have to worry about it.
I like how you think!
Surely NT (No Time) would be better?
Nobara Project is another good Fedora based build for those wanting to try Linux that will work relatively smoothly for gaming.
I’m on Linux :)
Translating into Linux terms, Steam has dropped support for:
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolian
Which came out more than a decade ago, for those who aren’t keeping score.
I’m on windows 11 :)
That is up to you of course. Luckily I left Microsoft Windows 12 years ago. No more.
For 90% of what I want to do it’s fine. I mainly code in c# so it’s actually better supported on windows then anywhere else.
Everything else I have WSL setup.
Lmao i only knew they could stop supporting windows 7, people uae more windows 7 than windows 8
Launching 8 for the first time was almost as bad as time I first experienced vista, so I can understand there being fewer 8 users.
WTF is Windows 8.1?
The un-fucking of Windows 8 release
It actually was a pretty useable OS most of the time
Yup, it was a very solid OS. It’s similar to how people remember XP, but what they really remember is XP Service Pack 2 which was the rock solid version.
I used 8.1 all the way until around 2019, when I finally relented and switched to 10 (on 11 now). Take Windows 7 and 10, and do a “greatest hits” edition, and you have 8.1. It was basically 7 with some features that went into 10 mixed in. A fine OS for daily driving.
I would have used it for longer; only upgraded because you’d run into random little issues and bugs with various programs cause no one used it.
What are the features that 10 has? A different separate control panel?
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The fix for the god awful TileOS decision.
I didn’t conceptually hate the UI there was just so much room for improvement in implementation, if I recall correctly. I was only using a Windows machine for a short time during that era though.
That’s why the Win10 start menu was better.
Tiles where it’s appropiate and you could even nake the start full screen to top it of.And then the Windows 11 came in and replaced those sweet flexibility with generic row of icons on top with the app list now in the separate menu and the bottom of the menu is wasted on ads and other garbage
Geez thank you Microsoft, you guys definitely went backwards with this one
Not like there were sponsored tiles on Win10 (at a minimum 1803 when I started to use Windows professionally and saw lot’s of desktops)
Windows 8.1 was a major update that undid a lot of UI updates that people didn’t like after 7
I had already uninstalled and replaced it with 7.
Ow… and Windows 11 also have stronger hardware requirements, making your laptop not usable in the future if Windows 10 is also deprecated. Causing more and more e-waste ;( just because of software from Microsoft.
8 and 8.1 is a shame. Best versions if Windows we’ve ever had.
Are/were you a big fan of Vista and ME as well?
Vista wasn’t actually a bad OS, it just got a bad reputation pretty fast because it had higher hardware requirements than XP and most people didn’t have decent enough hardware for a smooth experience. That in combination with the new UAC feature that most people thought was annoying drove people away pretty fast, although the OS itself wasn’t bad - in fact, it’s pretty similar to Windows 7.
Then it’s an example of a previous time Microsoft made the same dumb decision it made with Windows 11; setting hardware requirements too high for a large enough subset of your customer base that it will be noticed and cause part of that subset to drop your product instead of purchase compatible hardware. I did use Vista for about a year back when it was the latest Windows version, but even with a laptop that had it pre-installed, it lagged like crazy and eventually straight-up died irrecoverably. Installed Linux on that laptop, it worked fine, and have only really used Windows for work at my job I have to use it for since. If you control an almost monopolistic market share like MS does and you want to keep that market share, you have to keep in mind any types of hardware that a reasonably large portion of your userbase uses and make sure your product works solidly on that hardware. You can certainly drop support for really old or rare stuff, you have to move along SOME innovation, but the whole incompatibility problem with 11 shows that MS didn’t quite fully learn their lesson from Vista.
99 % of people didn’t “upgrade windows” back then. That would have required buying a whole new, full-price, license (or pirating). Even Service Packs were a whole deal to install. In those days you’d use your OEM Windows license the computer came with and that’d be that.
What did actually happen was OEMs selling millions of brand new shitbuckets, particularly laptops, with 1GB of RAM. That was fine on XP, but barely enough to boot Vista and if you stared any program it would swap like a motherfucker (sure, maybe it should have used less memory, but 7 wasn’t any better yet people were fine with it). Microsoft’s real mistake was allowing OEMs to sell new machines with 1 GB of RAM (IDK if it was to allow OEMs to install Vista on existing SKUs, but regardless it was the critical mistake that made everyone despise Vista).
Yeah, many OEM manufacturers wanted to jump onto the „Vista-compatible“ train and installed it on their low-end hardware, even though they shouldn’t have. This probably also played a big part in why Vista was considered bad.
Vista was a terrible OS. You can’t just ignore the hike in hardware requirements as if it wasn’t one of the defining parts of the Vista experience. It’s not just that people didn’t have the hardware to run Vista; people bought new hardware with Vista preinstalled that ran like dogshit! In other words, people essentially paid to have a downgrade. An OS that doesn’t run well is bad and no amount of features can change that.
Yeah, I’ve used windows from prior to 3 (when it was more of a shell to navigate DOS apps) to 3.11, 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, XP, XP SP2, Vista, 7, 8, and 10 (and probably NT via school). The only ones I’d describe as awful are the < 3 version (mostly because I was already using 95 at the time), 95 (unstable mess), ME (even more unstable mess), and 8 (UI screamed “we need to make our OS more appealing for the tablet market”). Vista might be the one I spent the most time on, now that I think of it.
Are you a masochist?
Vista was fine. I never had any issues.
It was during this time the transition to 64 bit systems became necessary to deal with needing to have more than 4GB of memory which was not helped by Vista using 2GB just to run, iirc. If you ran Vista 32 bit you had memory problems. If you ran Vista 64 bit you had major compatibility problems. It wasn’t until the end of Vista’s life did 64 bit go mainstream.
What can I say? I had a laptop with Vista pre-installed and it was fine.
Vista was amazing and 8/8.1 was refreshing. Also, Vista introduced hardware accelerated desktop rendering in Windows, finally no more tearing. I enjoyed using them. I personally haven’t had any gripes with any of the recent Windows versions.
I was helping my grandma with her old laptop that had Windows 8 and let me tell you, I only wanted to punch the screen 4 times!
Worst of both worlds.
Win10 beats it by a mile.
Only way to make the win better would be more privacy.
I, for one, am glad that from a security standpoint that companies like Valve are stopping support and giving patches and stuff to people using such outdated operating systems. If you are forced to use an old OS for work because of software limitations, that’s one thing, but there should be no reason you use an old OS as your daily driver if you ain’t getting any more security updates and patches. I don’t care how long it would take to reset everything and get things set up again, upgrade your damn OS when it’s not being supported anymore!
Microsoft doesn’t even support Windows 7 or 8 anymore, so hardly a surprise. Affected customers can switch to either Windows 10/11 or Linux.
When no longer supporting Ubuntu 16.04: No big deal, just update, duh…
When no longer supporting Windows 7/8: How dare you!
Gotta wonder how that affects older games that haven’t been updated since…
People paid for particular product on a particular platform. That’s what they will get sued over. People made a contract with steam for product that runs on a platform. That’s just contract law.
Valve are the ones who require tethering to their magical drm cloud - not my copy of ‘Monkey Island’.
so just like they were sued over axing Windows XP support, right?
“Valve Software has joined the ranks of Microsoft, Sony and Electronics Arts by requiring Steam users to waive their right to file a lawsuit against the company in order to use the digital distribution platform. The company made the announcement on Tuesday, saying that Steam’s new dispute resolution terms allow customers to only bring individual claims, not class action claims.”
Exactly.
On a particular platform - that platform is Steam, not Windows 7/8
