Sometimes when I see these newspapers bashing Microsoft I question whether they even think about what they are writing before pressing the publish button. Headline: Microsoft is doing what all other OS companies are doing too.
Sometimes when I see these newspapers bashing Microsoft I question whether they even think about what they are writing before pressing the publish button. Headline: Microsoft is doing what all other OS companies are doing too.
Yes. All big distributions backport drivers to older kernels they still support. And Microsoft still supports Windows 7 and 8, and has to do so until 2020/2023 or heads will roll, no matter what their marketing wants people to think.
Though the 32bit to 64bit was probably a big part of the big step between XP and 7.
If Windows 7 came with your machine you're covered. If you're looking to build or buy a new system you need to go Windows 10. If you don't like that, you have other non-Windows options.
However your point is still correct: RHEL 6 which will support these new chips was released a year after Windows 7. RHEL 5, released two years before Win7 is no longer getting hardware enablement, only security fixes and other critical stuff.
How does that make his point correct? There's still Windows 8, which neither gets support, and which was released two years after RHEL 6.
Windows 8.1 was technically also its own version and released 3 years after RHEL 6, but I'd even be okay with ignoring that one.
The kernel devs may not, but distros backport new stuff to old kernels constantly. For example, RHEL/CentOS 6 is kernel 2.6.32, release 7 years ago. But it supports modern CPUs.
It's not even limited to Microsoft; you can't install Mac OS X 10.7+ on anything older than a 2nd generation Core2 Duo, and with good reason. OS X 10.6 ran like crap on the first gen Core Duo and Core2 Duo machines, despite being fully supported by Apple.
There comes a time when the software exceeds the capabilities of the hardware, and this is no exception.
->There comes a time when the software exceeds the capabilities of the hardware, and this is no exception.
This is not "new software on old hardware". OK, It's happened before with other companies. For example Sony saying PS3 games will run on the PS4. But that kind of nonesense is why you don't buy Sony hardware, and their stock price is trundling along at record lows..
My advice is more specific. Anyone holding AMD or Intel stock. Sell now.
No one liked Win 98, and it was comprehensively EOL'd by Win XP - which always ran fine on iX machines.
Now, many people still prefer Win 7 to the creeping user-hostile horror that is Win 10 - if only because it's possible to use Win 7 with relative confidence that an update won't suddenly kill your machine, or your webcam, or your Kindle, or whatever else MS manages to screw up in the next year or two.
That's not a trivial difference. MS+Intel are attempting to force users towards an OS that is inherently broken, and - given the level of competence on display in the Windows division at the moment - is unlikely to ever work reliably.
As I recall Win 98 and 98SE were hugely popular. People may not have loved them, but I don't think it was generally disputed that they were a huge improvement over Win 95. In fact, hardly anyone liked Win ME, and many clung to 98 until XP arrived, much like people clung to XP and avoided Vista until Win 7 arrived.
Case in point at release win 98 was rather iffy, 98se was solid. XP was much better after SP1, win 7 was ok to start with but defiantly got better.
People freaking loved win98 once a few service packs got released, especially if they had the plus pack.
They didn't like Windows ME. Or Vista.
That's not true at all. Windows XP was based on NT, so had a very different technical base than 98. It had a completely different driver model, and could not run real-mode DOS apps. There was tons of hardware and software that it couldn't run. There were lots of people running 98 for a very long time to run legacy apps and hardware after XP came out. There probably still are.
The big difference is that those machines aren't on the internet, so no software maintenance is required.
That gamer inertia was powerful enough that Windows 98 got DirectX 9 in December 2002, well after the release of Windows XP, and Microsoft released their last DirectX on 98 in December 2006.
Are you saying that Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 exceed the capabilities of latest Intel and AMD chips?
Done that, and it works (as well as Win98 can, in any case.) Other apps from around that time will work too. Of course it can only use one core, but it's interesting to see just how ridiculously fast even a single core can be after 10 years of hardware improvement if the software hasn't "grown to fill the space".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOWzorOD-II (not me)
It's not even limited to Microsoft; you can't install Mac OS X 10.7+ on anything older than a 2nd generation Core2 Duo, and with good reason. OS X 10.6 ran like crap on the first gen Core Duo and Core2 Duo machines, despite being fully supported by Apple.
That's the opposite situation; newer software on older hardware.
As I've said before, the issue is with the removal of legacy hardware. Intel removed EHCI support for USB in it's chips with Skylake in favor of xHCI. This has been a long time coming and not a malicious or insidious act. Windows 7 doesn't natively have xHCI support and Microsoft isn't adding features to Windows 7. So, on Skylake, you can't install Windows 7 via USB and you can't use a USB keyboard or mouse during installation because the USB drivers are incompatible.
Install goes OK, system comes up and I have no Wireless Drivers. Fine. I plug in Ethernet. Doesn't work. Urgh. Ok, grab drivers on phone, use phone to transfer it. Nope, won't recognise anything in the USB3 ports.
I end up booting into linux and copying the driver install files directly onto the windows partition. If the drivers hadn't been available for windows 7 I would have been completely stuck.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...
There are many people who consider the older OS versions to be "better" than the latest Windows X. What "better" means is quite subjective - familiarity, stability, privacy, compatibility, etc. I really don't know, because I haven't used Windows in many years.
Finally, there's the "pirates" - hundreds of millions of people who run older versions of Windows, which are easier to crack because they're not as 'cloud-enabled' as Windows X.
But all in all, I agree that it's not such a big of a deal..
Windows 10 is just as easy to crack as windows 8.1. Just install a local KMS server and you're good to go.
I wonder if the obligatory updates will eventually detect and defeat those cracks, or have the pirates thought of that too? (Or perhaps, given the aggressive push by MS to get everyone on Win10, even giving it away for free, they won't really care.)
And with Apple, you are dealing with one vendor support a small set of their own products. The only way to get into this issue would be with a hackintosh rig.
The bigger the market share, the bigger commitment to users. Microsoft doesn't "have" to ensure their older OSes work on newer chips. That sentiment is just another way of indicating that the userbase may take action (like choose to keep systems even longer, leading to MSFT having to support Win7 even further into legacy than they did for XP).
As well, consider the enterprise customers who are entrenched in Win7 but absolutely need new machines for expansion, but can't commit to replacing all machines. What was simply buying new machines now turns into supporting a new OS in addition.
All they're saying is that if you go buy a new computer (which will probably have Win10 pre-installed anyways) you need to make sure you have software versions supported on those chipsets/CPUs.
And they did offer free upgrades.
I.e. many people have to run Windows to do their job and often even have to run Windows 7 specifically, but might still need new hardware in the future.
Microsoft is under absolutely no obligation to support Windows 7. Those "many people" should and will be forced to upgrade, otherwise a substitute will appear and rake over their jobs/company/market.
Microsoft is under no obligation to cater to the needs of any customers whatsoever.
Which is fine. MS can shoot itself in the head if it wants to.
But there will be consequences for the company.
Every year is the desktop year of something. Meanwhile I got fed up to keep trying to run GNU/Linux on my laptops.
Even the Asus Netbook I bought with Ubuntu support out of the box had wlan issues that took around 6 months to get sorted out.
People keep complaining, but the desktop market hardly changes.
Now the lower margins hybrid tablets/laptops is flooded with 2GB/32GB eMMC Windows 10 netbooks.
Exactly. The desktop/laptop market has been stagnating for some time. That's partly because the average hardware in those categories reached the point of being good enough for the average user. Personally, I think it's also partly because much of the PC software industry has been stuck in a rut for the past few years. Overall, for most users, the platform simply hasn't offered anything new that they couldn't already do with their 5+ year old gear.
In areas that do benefit substantially from newer hardware, like gaming or CAD or multimedia creative tools, the traditional PC has still been doing pretty well. There have been a lot of significant advances in areas like SSDs, graphics cards and monitors. There have been lots of advances in smaller, low-energy versions of relatively powerful components that have enabled high-end laptops to do things only chunky desktop workstations could do a few years ago. But these areas are only relatively small parts of the overall PC/laptop sector.
Meanwhile, entire sectors like smartphones, tablets and web apps have taken off like a rocket, by providing hardware that supports new and very different use cases, software that takes advantage of those new opportunities and, almost as importantly I suspect, software that typically is cheap and "just works".
Microsoft had well over a decade of almost totally unchallenged market dominance to figure out user-friendly installation, maintenance, removal and security/sandboxing of applications on Windows, and it rearranged the deck chairs a bit here and there. Apple came along with iPhones, almost one-touch installation from an app store and a [dumbed down|simplified] interface that anyone could use effectively, and they became the biggest company in tech in a fraction of that time.
What concerns me most about Microsoft's current direction is that they seem so determined to chase the cheap/easy sector and alternative revenue sources, which have been so effective for the likes of Apple and Google, that they're losing the default powerful/flexible platform that they've provided for the past two decades in the process, effectively stepping a long way backwards in that sector. The trouble is, because Microsoft have been so dominant in that sector for so long, where do those who still value that power and flexibility go instead, even if they are willing to pay a premium to get it?
How many people do actually tune their cars, specially modern ones that require all sorts of on-bord computers?
Or customize their VCRs, TVs and so on?
PC have become what every other home computer system already was, plain appliances.
Before the PC all other home computer systems had all their OS, or at least part of it in ROM and where mostly only expandable via external devices on their connection port, very few models had internal expansion bays.
The market has come to realize that the PC flexibilty doesn't pay any more in the age of "good enough hardware" and razor thing margins, so back to the old appliance model.
As for alternative OS, Apple isn't an alternative in the majority of the world. On my home country people earn on average 500 euros, only the upper layer can afford Apple computers.
ChromeOS is hardly practical, and never saw anyone using one in Europe. Just a few shops in Germany trying to get rid of them at any price.
Android might be a solution, but it remains to be seen how the desktop version of Android N really works out in the wild.
As for GNU/Linux systems, I stop considering them as I am yet to see the typical stores that average people go to buy computers invest in a proper packaged whole stack experience.
So this leaves us with Windows, bad or not, that the majority of people already know.
Are there any Windows APIs that have been actually dropped and not just deprecated?
With Linux, you can still install an alternative distro that doesn't use systemd. Or you could switch to a BSD. With Windows, you could keep using 7, up until now. Now you will eventually have no choice. It's as if systemd were completely embedded in the kernel and every alternative distro and *NIX nuked from orbit. Only, rather than mostly affecting sysadmins, this affects hundreds of millions of ordinary users.
I'm not a fan of systemd, but I think you're way off base. First, this is more of a hardware support issue than a revamped init rapidly growing into a full OS like a cancer. Second, this is the way it's been done since the early days of Windows; it's only in the headlines because Windows 10 is a good punching bag.
> With Windows, you could keep using 7, up until now.
Bullshit. You can keep using Windows 7 until the day your computer dies. There's no magical switch being flipped that suddenly renders your existing Windows 7 installation inoperable the day a Kaby Lake CPU hits the local reseller's shelves. You're being deliberately disingenuous here.
> It's as if systemd were completely embedded in the kernel and every alternative distro and ∗NIX nuked from orbit.
No, no it isn't. Again, this is a hardware support/driver thing, and has nothing to do with what's going on in Linux land. For that matter, who exactly is going to "nuke every alternative distro and ∗NIX from orbit"? While systemd has taken over most of the major Linux distros, there will always be some like Slackware and Alpine that run perfectly fine without it, and no one from the systemd cabal will care. I'd certainly love to know how you think the BSDs will be wiped out by the spread of systemd too, considering that Poettering and Sievers intend for systemd to remain Linux-only.