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Comment by rz2k | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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'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).

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

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