I remember when the Dolphin emulator dropped Windows 7 a few years ago. The absolute consternation, whining and even threats(!) against the developers was utterly sickening
Even as someone who enjoys "retro tech" far more than anything modern anymore, I'm hardly going to berate people to bend over backwards to keep supporting my ancient systems with modern software.
If someone wants to backport newer software as a hobby (such as Cameron Kaiser with TenFourFox, and the many downstream derivatives that spawned over the years) it's a welcome delight. But it should never be an "obligation"
Many (all?) of the people using windows 7 as their only OS at this point are zealots. It’s not surprising that some would respond that way. It’s largely a group of people who will never willingly change their habits and any removal of support is an assault. There were many valid reasons to not upgrade to 10 but the rational people have given up and upgraded or migrated to Linux/mac over the past decade.
They are committed. I found this kernel extensions project: https://github.com/i486/VxKex
Perhaps that'd be the OpenRCT2 fanatics' salvation.
"Only OS" is the caveat here.
Yeah, I’m not sure who else would be raging about dolphin dropping support. Not talking about people who keep an extra w7 box around for legacy software which Dolphin is not.
Why as their only OS? I assume many people connect their old PC to their TV and install a bunch of emulators. I suppose Linux could be an alternate solution for those machines.
A PC like this that doesn’t support Windows 10 is so outdated that even a $50 investment would get you a massive improvement.
The only reasons to keep Windows 7 are for niche SW/HW that only work on it and have no replacement, or because you want it out of principle. Neither of these are reasons to expect everyone else to bend over backwards to accommodate you.
Other than needing more RAM, all the hardware that works for Win 7 will work with Windows 10 and 11. Most software should as well.
Windows 7 drivers are compatible with windows 10 and 11 so there really isn't a reason you couldn't continue using basically any hardware after an upgrade.
I was thinking of the odd XP era PC which could run W7 but just barely. Those would be truly outdated machines with no reason to be around a livingroom.
I have netbooks which ran XP ok but W10 is a pain to run on them, or tablets with more modern Atom CPUs which ran W10 ok at the beginning but by the latest update they became close to unusable.
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