>Aside from security patches, I see nothing that prevents 7 from being used today. Subsequent OSes added nothing useful that I noticed, and a lot of negatives.
Steam is EOLing 7 because Chrome dropped support. No modern hardware manufacturer is going to continue churning out drivers with 7 support.
You're right that it works ok now, but that's rapidly changing.
As for whats better? Who knows. The new MS OSes are tremendously painful to use, personally speaking.
>Ironically, you may actually be more secure today running 95 than 7, since any modern exploit would be incompatible with it.
that's an interesting concept. Reminds me of how prepper types have recently been into MS-DOS machines -- but is 95 all that incompatible? I mean, I guess nothing trendy will run, but a good old-fashioned malicious assembly executable? do they no longer exist in the wild?
Agreed, lots of software is dropping 7 support, but that decision (as far as I can tell) is an arbitrary one, not a technical one. Is there a reason the latest chrome can't run on 7 if it didn't check for it?
> Is there a reason the latest chrome can't run on 7 if it didn't check for it?
The reason is precisely because it doesn't check for it.
That is: instead of checking for older Windows releases, and using fallback code paths for them, it simply assumes the presence of newer APIs (or that older buggy APIs now work properly). As time goes by, the cost of maintaining these fallback code paths only increases (and in some cases, having to stay compatible with them prevents important enhancements and cleanups), and since they're less tested (because they're only used when running on older operating system releases), they tend to break. As an example from an unrelated project, before they dropped Windows XP support, the fallback code for panic!() in Rust was broken when running on Windows XP (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/34538).
I imagine over time there will be API differences but probably nothing insurmountable.
I suspect the real reason is Microsoft themselves dropping support for W7. Once that happens you can’t really claim Chrome is a “secure browser” because the underlying OS might be exploited and never patched.
The same decision has been made in Python, to use the newer APIs blindly, but fortunately there's a fork: https://github.com/adang1345/PythonWin7 Hope Chromium will get one soon.
If you are looking for a computer that can do quite a bit, but still is reasonably "maintainable" with a soldering iron and parts, you can do much worse than an MS-DOS machine.
And almost by definition everything that was available, was all self-contained, because it was all pre-Internet.
> If you are looking for a computer that can do quite a bit, but still is reasonably "maintainable" with a soldering iron and parts, you can do much worse than an MS-DOS machine.
Some big problems with that idea are: 1) the machine would probably use a lot of power (unless you got some weird unmaintainable MS-DOS palmtop), 2) if the SHTF where are you going to get parts (especially for an obsolete retrocomputer)?
Practically, it would make far more sense to use Rasberry Pi with a DOS emulator. Then put ten more on a shelf as as your "spare parts." But I'm very skeptical of the use of a computer at all in "prepper" scenarios, so it makes even more sense to just not bother.
Yeah, I love how Valve is dropping support for Windows 7 (despite selling and shipping tons of games that are literally designed for Windows 7 or earlier) strictly because Steam is a web page served by Chromium Embedded Framework. Even software vendors don't truly own their own software anymore, do they? :)
Steam is EOLing 7 because Chrome dropped support. No modern hardware manufacturer is going to continue churning out drivers with 7 support.
You're right that it works ok now, but that's rapidly changing.
As for whats better? Who knows. The new MS OSes are tremendously painful to use, personally speaking.
>Ironically, you may actually be more secure today running 95 than 7, since any modern exploit would be incompatible with it.
that's an interesting concept. Reminds me of how prepper types have recently been into MS-DOS machines -- but is 95 all that incompatible? I mean, I guess nothing trendy will run, but a good old-fashioned malicious assembly executable? do they no longer exist in the wild?