Microsoft says Windows 7 isn't fit for modern hardware and security

[peterb]

^Thank you - I am quite surprised!

[Saracen]

You'd be surprised. There's an insane amount of per-app checking, to keep old apps running.

XP had this popup for known-incompatible apps:



And they kept working at it, to get a lot of XP-incompatible win95/98 apps running on Vista+!: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...-february-2010

And that's admirable.

But not much help when MS decide to force an update on a user, and the result is the user finds something he needs and that worked fine last night no longer works first thing this morning. Which is why the sensible, with machines they can't afford to be without, test all upgrades and updates thoroughly on a non-essential sacrificial machine before rolling it out - a procedure denied them by mandatory auto-updates, and why I have frozen my Windows machines at Win7 for essential applications, and migrated everything else to Linux.

[DanceswithUnix]

Who's doing the regression testing on that? What if app B was actually depending on buggy, undefined behaviour in libfoo 1.1? Which library authors are actually making dependable API/API contracts (the Java and JS worlds show us "none of them")

It does happen, and indeed as a software engineer it has happened to me.

Someone at some point in the past had written some buggy code in a package I was responsible for.
I developed the code on a Fedora machine which I kept up to date on the stable package stream.
A system library update caused the program to crash, because the library started detecting the rubbish call sequence.
I fixed the code, pushed the change. It went through the normal release and QA test cycle.

Now, the actual users were on RedHat server which has a slower and very conservative update cycle. They weren't going to see the problem for probably a year and a half, I don't know because I didn't hear a single bug report for that issue from the field. If people are updating their system, they will tend to update the application software as well. So the end result of the libraries changing for me was that a bug that needed fixing got fixed, customers will only have seen stability improvements overall.

Now there are people out there running old and no longer maintained software. If you do that, then you might occasionally snapshot and update the system but chances are you just don't update, ever. That's the bit that Saracen wants the option for. I also have had Linux partitions like that for old development environments.

If as a developer you know you are likely to deploy into tricky environments, then you static link rather than dynamic and just ship a bigger binary with almost no dynamic dependencies. Again, that needs to be allowed as a choice, though I always feel a bit dirty if using that one.

[jimbouk]

Having uninstalled the new calculator app in Windows 10 I've just found out the old one doesn't exist anymore. I was hoping it would just(!) be a case of tweaking the registry (like restoring Windows Photo Viewer) but it seems not.

A quick google ended my up on Wikipedia, followed by the Windows 10 editions page. Now I'm left wondering how as a home user I get hold of Enterprise LTSB without all the added gumpf...

Windows 10 isn't fit for modern computer users...

[TheAnimus]

^Thank you - I am quite surprised!

Check out this story:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/...-egg-problems/

If you don't want the long read, try just searching for SimCity. Frankly it's shocking.

[peterb]

Check out this story:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/...-egg-problems/

If you don't want the long read, try just searching for SimCity. Frankly it's shocking.

Excellent read - and written over 16 years ago! (And still relevant)

[MercutioUK]

Until they get the message with the telemetry crap. Spybot anti-beacon = job done

It "sadly" breaks the use of bing as a search tool (OH NO! Screamed all the 1 users, together). Otherwise wonderful.

[Rubarb]

Love the way they say windwos 7 isn't fit for modern computing yet neglect to add that windows 8/ 8.1 is even worse.