Is anyone planning on sticking with Windows 10 and exercising prudence while taking their chances?

In My Humble Opinion
121

What I saw said that if your ipad or iPhone is over 9 years old and can’t run IOS 16, the discourse sites will stop working. It also will require Firefox 128, which is the current extended support branch, and requires Windows 10 (2015) or later or MacOS 10.15 (2019) or later.

Our disposable society is a bad thing, but that isn’t what is happening here. Eventually people have to accept their ipad 4 from 2012 is no longer fit for browsing the web, and nobody wants to stay locked into technology that will still work on every random old device people are unwilling to give up. 9 years is ancient in mobile tech time, and I’m glad there are things out there that won’t run on my phone from back then (I think a Samsung Galaxy, that didn’t even have a number yet, because it was the first Galaxy or maybe it was a Galaxy III that got a Roman numeral).

122

This. I do support work for a computer gaming company, and have fielded many complaints from Windows, Mac and Linux users - how come my game that used to work no longer does? Well the game is still being updated but your OS and hardware is the same. You have access to the old game versions that still work, but if you want to play the current version you need to keep up with the times.

Do you really want game developers to only make changes that do not affect obsolete OSs? If so then maybe you need to only buy games that ceased development when your OS version did.

123

What would be a reasonable amount of browsers to support (given that 99.9% of people are on a fairly new chromium distribution)?

124

I doubt it’s 99.9% on some flavor of Chromium. But I grant your point that that engine has pretty well conquered the market. The larger issue is not so much how many brands of browser, but how many versions ago of browsers.


My own personal attitude is that tech is a game best played with new(ish) hardware and software. Anyone wants into the game needs to understand the price of admission is all new stuff every few years.

I can sympathize with the folks who want to buy a PC or phone and use it until it dies of old age 25 years later. But that’s not a realistic expectation. If you want something that works as well as new 25 years later, buy a shovel.

Or at least buy something that does not interact all day every day with the entire rest of the world. Permanently unplug your XP machine from the internet and it will indeed work great for decades.

But what most of the slow-tech people want is access to all the new whizbang software, or at least websites, but no investment required. Nope.

125

Shoot, I’ve been getting blocked lately by CloudFlare (which provide DDoS screening for a lot of websites) since my “browser is out of date”. I’m on the current version of Brave, a Chromium-based browser.

It turns out that CloudFlare has been flagging a lot of browsers as out of date lately.

Dear CloudFlare: Here’s an easy way to stop all DDoS attacks via browsers: block them all!

126

I update Firefox every time it tells me an update is available (which is often), and right now I’m at 137.

And no awareness of or effort needed to keep things up-to-date, even when updates are readily available.

127

The Firefox you are using is the main release branch, with all the latest bells and whistles.

Periodically, Mozilla’s developers will try to use a new bell or whistle provided by new versions of the OS platforms they run on. Because this isn’t, by definition, usable in the older versions, people who use those older OS versions have to use the previous versions of the browser.

To make things easier for those folks, Mozilla supports the previous versions of their browser on the extended support branch that echoreply mentions. Those browsers will generally get only security and bug fixes, but might occasionally get an added feature upgrade backported from the main release branch.

At some point, if you keep upgrading your browser but not your OS, you might end up shunted onto a later extended support branch. Your browser might not run as fast, or do things as well as more modern versions, but it should at least remain secure as long as that extended support branch is, well, supported.

128

Good to know. :+1:t3:

I’m 76. Maybe I won’t live long enough for that to be a problem. :wink:

129

I’m firmly planning on you living to 100 and posting here the whole time. It wouldn’t be the same without you (and the same for most of the others as well!).

130

Every Saturday lately lol!

131

Awww… :slightly_smiling_face: Well, by the time I’m really old, you’ll be a seasoned mod, and you can expect me to thoroughly put you through your paces. Hey, I’ll need some reason to keep getting up in the morning. :woman_fairy:t4:

132

I can’t speak to what “most” of them allegedly want, but for me, this is absolutel not true. Quite the contrary, I find most new “features” to be, at best, superficial or useless, and at worst, to actually degrade the user experience.

In the case of Discourse, I’d be interested in having someone explain why “relative color syntax, subgrid, and lookbehind regex” is so all-fired important that it justifies obsolescing an entire generation of browsers. I like Discourse, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of any significant way of improving it. In fact, my only real complaint is that it’s already so feature-rich that, on my relatively old tablet, it takes longer to load than any other website.

Or consider the evolution, or lack thereof, of Micrsoft Windows. Windows XP was a genuine advance, bringing to consumers for the first time the stability of the Windows NT kernel, and obsolescing the Windows NT product line. Was I reluctant to adopt it? Ha! I was so anxious to move into this exciting new world that, through my contacts at Microsoft, I was running a beta version before XP was even officially released!

I was even fairly accepting of Windows 7, though the incremental advantages were minimal and the migration from XP was painful. But Win 7 at least offered stable support for the 64-bit version and the ability to address more physical memory than XP, and generalized file transfer support for Android devices via MTP. It also had the Aero interface which is pretty but functionally useless, and Microsoft abandoned it later.

But subsequent operating systems? Nothing. There is nothing in Windows 10 or 11 that I want or need. There is absolutely no practical reason we couldn’t still all be running fully supported versions of Windows 7. The reasons we can’t are all artificial and mostly related to Microsoft’s business model.

The Windows 10 UI was premised on the idea that everybody and their dog would be using touch screens, which, just like Bill Gates’s obsession with pen input, turned out not to be the case. Tablets may be computers, but traditional computers aren’t tablets, and aren’t used that way. Windows 10 and 11 have both been criticized for their UI changes, which represent the core of my criticism here: change simply for the sake of change.

133

Bloated menus. I use certain functions in Win10 that you get the buttons for with one right-click. There they are in that menu that pops up.

But in Win11? Oh, no, no, no. Here, go past all the options you don’t want to the bottom menu item and click that to get to a longer menu, cluttered with more features you don’t want, till you’ve scrolled down near the bottom to get what you need.

ETA: And they’re not obscure, little-used options, dammit. Like “delete” for example, or “rename”.

134

Would you believe us when we tell you W11 is significantly more secure than its predecessor ?
And that that absolutely is a worthwhile feature?

XP, vista, W7, W8, W10 all were ok-ish in their day, but if you do anything critical (like email) on a system, please update to an OS that is less than 5 years old.
(W10 was released in 2015)

The internet is not a nice place. There are many more people working to protect you than I think you imagine,
Please accept that they do something useful and simply let your browser update itself whenever it needs to.
Without services like Cloudflare the internet would be all but useless.

135

Please allow me to clarify, dear highly esteemed pup.

What you seem to want is no change, while being connected to the whirlwind of continuous change which is inherent in the internet.

You’re no doubt right that your Win7 system and the standalone apps you have solve all of your non-internet use cases just fine. And have no need of change since your use cases are as stagnant as your isolated software.

But the internet ain’t holding still. Not for you, nor me, nor anyone. And not merely due to “change for change’s sake” in your dismissive terminology.

Like it or not, a modern phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop is predominantly an internet terminal. It’s stand-alone compute and storage capabilities are utterly secondary to its connectivity functions.

All of our devices must keep up within some reasonable distance of the leading edge of the internet, or be disconnected from it.

There is no third way, no stagnant backwater of e.g. 2005 internet you can live within as some sort of walled garden.


ETA: And as @The_Librarian said just above, the internet makes the Barbary Coast of old seem like an idyllic kindergarten picnic, not the province of navies (and armies) of professional cutthroats.

The flux of absolute anarchic piracy hitting your router every second of every day would have caused 17th Century England to have invaded those source countries and enslaved their populace.

136

My answer to both of those is the same. There is no intrinsic reason that Windows 7 could not be as secure as the most recently updated Windows 11. The objection here is that it’s impractical for Microsoft to continue to support old operating systems beyond a certain timeframe. I agree. But the problem is created by Microsoft itself, which continues to release new operating systems with features that no one wants or needs, or that are actually detrimental to the user experience, because that’s how they make money.

Everything else cascades down from that simple fact. The companies that make browsers can’t continue to support browsers for Windows 7 because Microsoft has arbitrarily changed shit in the new operating systems. The company that makes my tax preparation software can no longer continue to support Windows 7 because Microsoft has arbitrarily changed shit in the new operating systems. When you have development teams, developers gotta develop. When you have a business, you need ongoing income. There’s no money to be made by freezing perfectly good technology. It’s a fact of life, but software tech is an extreme example of rapid change just for the sake of change, because it’s so easy.

There was an exceptionally long gap between Windows XP and Vista. That’s because Microsoft had unrealistically ambitious plans for Vista that were abandoned one by one, and in any case XP was a great OS and no one was complaining. When Vista was finally released it was a bloated mess that no one really liked. Windows 7 fixed a lot of the bloat, which was its primary redeeming feature. It was kind of an apology for Vista. Since then, Microsoft has been churning out new OS releases without even a pretext of significant new functionality, and as @EddyTeddyFreddy so aptly notes, some of the changes are downright regressive.

More specifically, I still want to know why “relative color syntax, subgrid, and lookbehind regex” is so vitally important that it’s going to force me to throw out the best computer I’ve ever had and the best OS I’ve ever used.

137

More likely it’s due to them upgrading the framework they are using which in turn doesn’t support the old browser version. No new framework, no security patches. :musical_note: The circle of life…

138

I think I’ve managed to achieve what you want, but it took takes a lot of work. My solution is definitely not for everyone, and probably not even for 90% of Linux users.

I’ve been using the same install of my operating system for 25+ years, and the same desktop environment for probably 20. Except, everything is also the newest version with all of the latest security and feature updates.

My laptop has an install of Debian Sid/unstable, which I first installed around 1998. Whenever I get a new laptop, I just copy it from my old one over to the new one, make whatever tweaks are necessary to use the new hardware, and get back to work. Sid is a rolling release, so as the various programs that make up Debian are updated, my laptop updates.

My desktop environment is based on Xfce4, which has been out since 2003, though I don’ think I’ve been using it that long. Occasionally there is an update which breaks some widget I’m using, but the parts I interact with essentially stay the same.

It takes work to keep all of that the same. It would be easier to just update to whatever the newest Ubuntu is, and then every 6 or 12 months, upgrade again, and take the hit if something major changes.

Microsoft could run a similar process. Keep the Windows 7 interface with a few changes to take advantage of new hardware abilities, and upgrade the guts with new features and fixes, but from the outside it would look very much the same. Old hardware would occasionally lose support, and some new features might only be available on new hardware.

I think that was even Microsoft’s plan with their Windows 10 forever idea, which didn’t last.

139

I agree with the sentiment, but I have since seen people try Windows 7 again, and there have been these incremental improvements enough that you wind up with something that doesn’t quite work as you’d hope. Not that they couldn’t have added all of that to Windows 7.

Not that I doubt you yourself couldn’t get by with Windows 7 as long as you have one of those up-to-date Chrome ports made to run on Windows 7.

140

You think MS isn’t allowed to make money?

And you will not do the work to switch to Linux?

That is whole lot of stupid to justify your whining.