this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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I think people misunderstand what "active support" means, yeah. Of course Steam will at least for a time still work on Windows 7/8. It just means they're sunsetting the testing VMs they're using. From now on any breakage might happen and not be caught. Or might not happen. They won't go out of their way to break it though, that'd be extra work for no income.
It will break as soon as they update CEF which they were likely dragging their feet on doing to keep Windows 7/8.1 support.
The entire Steam UI is a web page running on embeded chromium (what cef is), They're using an ancient version atm (v85 i believe), current version is v121 and Windows 7/8.1 support was dropped in v110.
Because this will happen to Windows 10, 11 and so on as well. And at some point Windows will make breaking changes for some software in perhaps a decade or more, even if only overall very minor. We need and should think about preservation of cultural goods.
Strengthening the open source community is not completely equal to archival missions. Keeping existing data available and usable is very different than rewriting code.
The music CDs and DVDs in the library are most often proprietary, too, but they don't suddenly disappear.