Hacker News Reader

Comment by porker | Hacker News Reader

Bugger. Windows 7+.

I've had Windows 7 sitting on the shelf since the day it launched, but haven't get got round to installing it...

So.. You're either running Vista (and I really doubt that, because the upgrade to 7 is more or less straight forward, you'd have done it a long time ago) or the long dead, end of life, unsupported, zombie OS called Windows XP.

Which is fine. But shouldn't you _expect_ being left out by now? XP came out in 2001 (hazy memory, quoting Wikipedia). OS X (10.0, Cheetah) came out the same year. What's the minimum requirement for the Cocoa app?

Well, a quick lookup says 10.6, which is from 2009. Which, incidently, is the same year Windows 7 came out. So Sourcetree needs an OS that is no more than 3.x years old..

Bugger?

To be fair, SP3 was released in mid 2008, 7 wasn't released until late 2009, and XP had a greater usage share than 7 (and Vista combined) until early 2011.

It is a sensible decision to only target Windows 7+, and the only reason to stick with XP would be specific compatibility with older programs, but it is a stretch to dismiss XP as a product that came out a decade ago when it still has an enormous market share.

I agree. And I still don't know if he runs XP at all, of course.

But being turned off by the '3+ years old OS' requirement is .. just odd.

Yes I do still run XP - I've kept running it for a few reasons:

1) I've spent months customising this install so it 'just works' for me 2) There's over 200 programs I'll have to find, download and install on Windows 7 (finding my license keys, old binaries etc if necessary) 3) I keep saying I'll replace this PC (from late 2006), so it's not worth reinstalling... :)

Gee, I hope your hard drive keeps spinning, or you'll have a mess on your hands. I think I take the opposite approach. I try to have the most easy-to-reproduce dev (and just general use) environment possible.

Unless I am doing very heavy weight development work all of my dev envs are in VMware Worktstation virtual machines. So flexible to work with and I can archive off the whole devenv with the project once complete knowing I can just load it back up in a few minutes if I need to in the future. Bliss.

Same here. So if my tower blows up for whatever reason, I can be up and running by installing VMware and loading my basic environment image from a backup. Pull down the latest code and I'm good to go.

I believe there are still more people using XP than using Windows 8.

I'm assuming a lot here, but I would think that ST's userbase would be tech-savvy enough to know that XP isn't going to make the cut 12 years later (in addition not to be using it for that long for any kind of coding/repo management).

7 the the first version of Windows that didn't bring me out in hives. Give it a whirl...you might be pleasantly surprised.

I've used windows 7 and do like it - it's the thought of reinstalling ~200 pieces of software that's been putting me off.

Give me apt for Windows..!

http://chocolatey.org/ is perhaps the closest thing you'll find.

Thanks!

You've been missing out on the best OS Microsoft has released IMO.

You have a year to upgrade before Microsoft pulls it completely off of life support: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/endofsupport.aspx

If you care about security, performance, usability or even basic things like display text quality, upgrade now.

New computer coming this year - when I decide whether to stick with a Windows PC or switch to OSX...

While I love software, you might have gathered I hate computer hardware and the setup of OS's :)

It really makes me wonder what is that they're using that doesn't work for older Windows...

I think it installed .net framework 4.5 - which according to Wikipedia is vista and above. And I bet they just didn't care to support vista.

Perhaps they just don't want to invest in ensuring backwards compatibility, in particular testing overhead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com