this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Postcard64 14 points 10 months ago

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 OSs get outdated and stop being supported.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.

[–] Buddahriffic 23 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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?

[–] alekwithak 24 points 10 months ago

End of support means no more security updates. MS already ended support for Win 7 which has numerous unpatched vulnerabilities.

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[–] TotalFat 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No big. Just run everything in compatibility mode and pick Windows 10 or 11.

/s

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Pro tip, set it to Windows 12 so you don't have to worry for another decade or more

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Please, that's rookie terms.

Set it to 98, you won't have to worry about it again for like, a century.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Get this set it to 2000, not even your great grand kids will have to worry about it.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (15 children)

Lmao i only knew they could stop supporting windows 7, people uae more windows 7 than windows 8

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (5 children)
[–] MrVilliam 8 points 10 months ago (7 children)

How's the experience, overall? I love the Steam Deck OS UI, so I'm thinking of building an AMD machine to run Chimera OS. I've heard nothing but problems when it comes to Windows 11.

I don't intend on playing competitive shooters, so idc about kernel anticheat keeping me out of Call of Duty or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I play exclusively on Linux. Almost every game I tried worked flawlessly. The very few that didn't, crashed on startup or a few minutes after. If you don't play AAA online games with anticheat then you should be good. As a rule of thumb, if it works on the Deck then it will work on any Linux distro.

[–] MrVilliam 3 points 10 months ago

Hell yeah! I've only experienced a few crashes on SD, and so far only on 2 emulated games that I'm okay with just not playing. I love that Valve started really investing in Linux support to make it possible for idiots like me to have somewhere to turn when Microsoft phones it in.

[–] demonsword 8 points 10 months ago (4 children)

If you are using steam, there's protondb, where you can check how well game runs on linux

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I'm a fairly casual gamer these days, but nonetheless it's been a very long time since I encountered a game on Steam that wouldn't run at least tolerably well under Proton, with most of them running flawlessly. As long as you check the DB before buying, you're fine. As you say, it's only really the anticheat software which causes major road blocks most of the time.

Performance is amazingly better on Linux via Proton than it is on Windows quite a lot of the time. It's an incredible achievement.

For non Steam games, Lutris also provides as easy, one-click experience for getting many games working, and although I don't have a lot of personal experience with it (Steam covers most of my needs) when I have used it it's been a pleasure, and it has a good reputation.

I use bog standard un-tweaked Ubuntu. One would assume that the performance on the specialist gaming distros may be even better still.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I'm always blown away by how well gaming on Linux is in this era.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Translating into Linux terms, Steam has dropped support for:

  • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron
  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolian
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[–] Kanzar 16 points 10 months ago

Nobara Project is another good Fedora based build for those wanting to try Linux that will work relatively smoothly for gaming.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] reddig33 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Steam would be smart to package their steam deck OS as a dual boot installer for PCs. Boot right into steam when you want to play games.

[–] Waluigis_Talking_Buttplug 7 points 10 months ago (4 children)

They're eventually going to release SteamOS onto desktop platforms, but for now you can just install Linux.

SteamOS has so many deck and handheld specific features that it's not really a good OS for desktop hardware. HoloISO is something you can install, though, as long as you don't have a Nvidia card, which is just SteamOS packaged in a way that let's it run on other hardware

[–] Nindelofocho 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

SteamOS has a normal linux desktop, its only in deck mode where everything is deck specific

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (6 children)

8 and 8.1 is a shame. Best versions if Windows we've ever had.

[–] partial_accumen 45 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Your post would do well in "unpopular opinion".

[–] NoRodent 15 points 10 months ago (7 children)

To be fair, W8.1 wasn't that bad, you could even change the full screen start menu to a regular one. W10 was better though. W11 is... well they fixed the most glaring issues over the last year but I still can't get over the crippled start menu.

[–] partial_accumen 6 points 10 months ago

The "modern" (aka metro) interface was possibly good on a phone or tablet. Arguably even possibly on a touch screen laptop (not for me though). However it had no business being on a mouse driven computer or even worse a server operating system (Windows 2012).

Even the idea for "metro" apps was horrible. Full screen only. The whole reason the OS is called windows is because you could have two "windows" with two different applications on screen at a single time.

MS could have still included the metro interface if they still shipped the classic Start menu as an opt-in. Yes, its the first thing 90% of users would opt-in to, but at least it wouldn't have had Windows 8 be a rotten footnote in the history of computing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I was done with Windows when the spying and built in advertising. Poor design decisions are one thing, but untrustworthy untoward actions to the user are another. The last shred of trustworthiness Micro$oft had in my eyes was was being mostly straight in Windows instead of the shady and underhanded shit. We should've seen it coming when they started offering free upgrades

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[–] A7thStone 14 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (6 children)

Are/were you a big fan of Vista and ME as well?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] thisisawayoflife 3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

LOL wasn't ME sorry of a bolt on to 98? IIRC that was the most unstable version of Windows I had ever used. It actually forced me to explore Linux as a desktop seriously for the first time (and shit was jacked in 98-00). I seriously used NT4 as a desktop because it was the most stable version of Windows I could find at the time. Hard time playing games though.

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[–] dantheclamman 5 points 10 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

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!

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