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.
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.
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Didn’t stop me from gaming on 7 either. I was only gaming on my windows partition so I didn’t worry too much about vulns. Nothing in 8-11 interests me so I thought I’d try all my gaming in Linux and have been blown away by how good it is. I ran 7 up until last April and the cracks had finally started to show.
The cracks were probably because you were part of a botnet for using an insecure OS for years lol
It was mainly due to qt dropping support (used by OBS, I could have stayed on an old version) and Steam for the same reason but Chromium. I probably could have kept my old computer and stayed on 7 for longer if I wanted to.
Nice job ignoring the very real possibility that your computer has been part of a botnet for years. The botnet thanks you for your service.
I did ignore it, literally didn’t read it. You have to run code or data from untrusted sources (or be available on a network) to get exploited, and I know that computer wasn’t doing anything high bandwidth otherwise it would affect my gaming. I literally only played games on the install for a couple hours a night and my browser and other software was up to date.
Congrats on joining Linux squad!
Linux gaming got waaaaay better than in before times. Also, the system itself is a miracle for someone coming from Windows. I remember that feeling. It’s correct :)
Oh I’m very aware, I’ve been running Linux in one way or another for 20 years :)
Ah, great! Should be like at home then :)
I’ve never felt more at home! No separate machines, no dualbooting, my games run great :D
They do!
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 OSs get outdated and stop being supported.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.
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?
End of support means no more security updates. MS already ended support for Win 7 which has numerous unpatched vulnerabilities.
Steam is basically a DRM system which means you won’t be able to run any of your existing games on Windows 7/8. It will break all your steam games either immediately or within days.
Citation needed…
No big. Just run everything in compatibility mode and pick Windows 10 or 11.
/s
Pro tip, set it to Windows 12 so you don’t have to worry for another decade or more
Please, that’s rookie terms.
Set it to 98, you won’t have to worry about it again for like, a century.
Get this set it to 2000, not even your great grand kids will have to worry about it.
I like how you think!
Surely NT (No Time) would be better?
Nobara Project is another good Fedora based build for those wanting to try Linux that will work relatively smoothly for gaming.
Lmao i only knew they could stop supporting windows 7, people uae more windows 7 than windows 8
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.
WTF is Windows 8.1?
The un-fucking of Windows 8 release
It actually was a pretty useable OS most of the time
Yup, it was a very solid OS. It’s similar to how people remember XP, but what they really remember is XP Service Pack 2 which was the rock solid version.
I used 8.1 all the way until around 2019, when I finally relented and switched to 10 (on 11 now). Take Windows 7 and 10, and do a “greatest hits” edition, and you have 8.1. It was basically 7 with some features that went into 10 mixed in. A fine OS for daily driving.
I would have used it for longer; only upgraded because you’d run into random little issues and bugs with various programs cause no one used it.
What are the features that 10 has? A different separate control panel?
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Windows 8.1 was a major update that undid a lot of UI updates that people didn’t like after 7
I had already uninstalled and replaced it with 7.
Soon Windows 10.1
The fix for the god awful TileOS decision.
I’m on Linux :)
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.
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.
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.
If you are using steam, there’s protondb, where you can check how well game runs on linux
I appreciate the link, but I was more asking about the general experience than about game compatibility. I have a Steam Deck and am enjoying the game functionality, and I haven’t hit too many snags in general PC usage on it yet in desktop mode (but I’ve barely used it for that). I’m really just asking around as a medium level Windows user about fully replacing my Windows laptop with a Chimera build to see what concessions I’ll need to accept to have realistic expectations. I’m optimistic that frustrations will be mostly at the “dang it, oh well” level which I could either live with or find a layman level solution to kinda fix. So far, the only real concern I’ve found with my plan to build a modern Chimera steam machine is that the parts I want will cost me like $1500, and that’s pretty hard to justify when I already have a Steam Deck, PS5, and a 2015 Windows 10 laptop. It’s another expensive device that kinda just does what my current shit can already do, just all in one rig. If my laptop or PS5 died, I’d have a lot more reason to go for it.
If you already have a Steam Deck, then you are basically already familiar with Linux gaming. The software-side of things (Steam, Proton, etc) is going to be the same on desktop Linux.
If a game is compatible with the Deck, then it is also comaptible with desktop.
I’ve been a Linux gamer for about a decade now. I stick with single player games, so I generally don’t have any issues, other than a minor tweak or DLL override I sometimes have to do, but that’s no different than trying to run older games on Windows.
Only real issue would be installing mods, which is possible, but could require some extra work, such as manually setting DLL overrides. I’ve had trouble getting Reloaded II to work in Linux, for example, even though they claim they support Linux.
Maybe the opinion of someone who switched recently would be more useful to you. I’m probably a little biased since I’ve been exclusively running linux for almost 20 years now
and a 2015 Windows 10 laptop
It’s very easy to create a bootable USB stick to just try it out and, if you have enough hard disk to spare and your experience is fine, make it dual boot. This way you can assess if it works for you or not
Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t think of using a USB stick to try this out. I feel like an idiot lol.
But now that I think about it, I don’t think it will work right because my laptop is Intel/Nvidia and I keep seeing that Chimera doesn’t work great unless you’re running AMD/AMD. If it runs at all, I’m sure it won’t be representative of the experience I’d have with the build I would want. But that’s something pretty straightforward that I completely overlooked, so thanks for the suggestion!
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.
I’m always blown away by how well gaming on Linux is in this era.
Especially if you’re not gonna play stuff that the anticheat locks you out from, the experience is great. As other commenters have said, ProtonDB.com has resources for how well games on steam run under Proton / On Linux.
Although, I would recommend Nobara Linux over Chimera OS due to a lack of experience with Proton and other gaming-related tools (as in, Chimera developers’ lack of experience). Nobara Linux comes from the same developer as Proton-GE (GloriousEggroll). Proton is the tool that Valve developed to run Windows games pretty much seemlessly, and Proton-GE adds extra features and patches on-top of it that can help support more games or get the slightest extra bit of performance out of Proton. Nobara Linux extends this concept to the entire OS, with a stable Fedora base that gets a major update every ~6 months.
Nobara also consitently outperforms other Linux Distributions and even Windows regularly.
(This doesn’t mean that you don’t get updates for 6 months, just that major releases, e.g from 39 to 40 happen every ~6 months)
Ooh, I’ll look into that! I was interested in Chimera because of some articles and videos I’ve seen which were praising its similarities to Steam OS. I liked booting up into Steam directly via the controller like it’s just another console, but having the freedom to use it as a PC. And it seemed popular enough that if I hit a snag I could probably find somebody out there who had the same issue and already found and posted a fix. Plus continuing support, which is something I learned is not the case for HoloISO. I guess I was looking for the closest thing to Steam OS which is Arch based, so I thought I had to run an Arch Linux to have a good console-like UI/UX.
It’s sublime. Pretty much every game you throw at it works perfectly.
Don’t stretch the truth and give them an unrealistic idea.
There are games that don’t work, Some due to draconian and oppressive DRM or invasive anti-cheat. Some don’t work just because.
Generally, the ones that work dont just because will eventually become playable. I’ve had a few games I had to back burner for a while, but a few months later became perfectly playable with proton updates and such.
But on the flipside I have Day 1’d quite a few games, some perfectly (Mostly games with older engines like Starfield), some not so perfectly (Like Cyberpunk 2077), but they were all very playable with patience and understanding.
@MrVilliam I suggest you hit protondb.com and check the games you commonly play. If they are gold or higher you should be good.
As for Distro, I’d personally recomend Nobara for gaming on Linux. Its a great experience, smooth, and has pretty much everything you need packaged in the install already, so you don’t have to deal with any tedious bullshit like having to compile something if its not packaged for your distro.
I dont mean to repeat myself, but patience and understanding is going to be key in successfully getting it going. You’re gonna be learning a completely new OS, and new procedures, from scratch. There will be moments where it may be frustrating trying to figure things out, but you don’t have to be a Tech Savant to get through it, and once you get your head wrapped around it… installing and playing will pretty much be as seamless as you’re used to on windows. Its not perfect by any means, regardless of what anyone says, but its pretty god damn good where its at now, and is rapidly getting better.
Translating into Linux terms, Steam has dropped support for:
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolian
I’m on windows 11 :)
That is up to you of course. Luckily I left Microsoft Windows 12 years ago. No more.
For 90% of what I want to do it’s fine. I mainly code in c# so it’s actually better supported on windows then anywhere else.
Everything else I have WSL setup.
8 and 8.1 is a shame. Best versions if Windows we’ve ever had.
Your post would do well in “unpopular opinion”.
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.
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.
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
Even worse is the loss of the basic ability to unlock the taskbar; RIP over/under monitor configurations.
but I still can’t get over the crippled start menu
You know you can set it back to “legacy”, right? I’ve been using Win11 since it was beta and when you swap the new default gui elements back to “legacy”, it’s much better than even win 10.
Dude, what? Explain
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the issue, but I’m reading it as a dislike for the new “modern” start menu in win11 that’s center screen and feels designed for touch interfaces?
You can disable that and turn it more like a win 7 style start menu.
I’m not talking about taskbar, I’m talking about start menu. You can change the position of the start button back to the left, which was the first thing I of course did, but you can’t do anything about the start menu itself (at least without using 3rd party solutions which I generally try to avoid, not to mention they’re usually not free, unless there’s some secret that you know I’m unaware of). You can’t change the menu’s tiny size, not have the icons categorized, grouped, in different sizes with irregular placement, live tiles… You also can’t drag and drop the icon onto desktop to create a shortcut there (nor is there such option in the context menu). I really liked the W10 start menu.
Are/were you a big fan of Vista and ME as well?
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.
Vista was a terrible OS. You can’t just ignore the hike in hardware requirements as if it wasn’t one of the defining parts of the Vista experience. It’s not just that people didn’t have the hardware to run Vista; people bought new hardware with Vista preinstalled that ran like dogshit! In other words, people essentially paid to have a downgrade. An OS that doesn’t run well is bad and no amount of features can change that.
Then it’s an example of a previous time Microsoft made the same dumb decision it made with Windows 11; setting hardware requirements too high for a large enough subset of your customer base that it will be noticed and cause part of that subset to drop your product instead of purchase compatible hardware. I did use Vista for about a year back when it was the latest Windows version, but even with a laptop that had it pre-installed, it lagged like crazy and eventually straight-up died irrecoverably. Installed Linux on that laptop, it worked fine, and have only really used Windows for work at my job I have to use it for since. If you control an almost monopolistic market share like MS does and you want to keep that market share, you have to keep in mind any types of hardware that a reasonably large portion of your userbase uses and make sure your product works solidly on that hardware. You can certainly drop support for really old or rare stuff, you have to move along SOME innovation, but the whole incompatibility problem with 11 shows that MS didn’t quite fully learn their lesson from Vista.
99 % of people didn’t “upgrade windows” back then. That would have required buying a whole new, full-price, license (or pirating). Even Service Packs were a whole deal to install. In those days you’d use your OEM Windows license the computer came with and that’d be that.
What did actually happen was OEMs selling millions of brand new shitbuckets, particularly laptops, with 1GB of RAM. That was fine on XP, but barely enough to boot Vista and if you stared any program it would swap like a motherfucker (sure, maybe it should have used less memory, but 7 wasn’t any better yet people were fine with it). Microsoft’s real mistake was allowing OEMs to sell new machines with 1 GB of RAM (IDK if it was to allow OEMs to install Vista on existing SKUs, but regardless it was the critical mistake that made everyone despise Vista).
Yeah, many OEM manufacturers wanted to jump onto the „Vista-compatible“ train and installed it on their low-end hardware, even though they shouldn’t have. This probably also played a big part in why Vista was considered bad.
Yeah, I’ve used windows from prior to 3 (when it was more of a shell to navigate DOS apps) to 3.11, 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, XP, XP SP2, Vista, 7, 8, and 10 (and probably NT via school). The only ones I’d describe as awful are the < 3 version (mostly because I was already using 95 at the time), 95 (unstable mess), ME (even more unstable mess), and 8 (UI screamed “we need to make our OS more appealing for the tablet market”). Vista might be the one I spent the most time on, now that I think of it.
Are you a masochist?
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.
It was basically supposed to be one last short-lived DOS based Windows version before Windows switched to an NT base with XP, and in that sense it served its purpose. But although it was a separate product, it was basically '98 second edition in a box. It certainly worked to push people towards jumping to XP a year later, lol. XP is still the best version of Windows MS ever made, IMO. Heard good things about 7, but I was already daily driving Linux by the time 7 was released after Vista bricked itself.
I remember using 2k for a long time, after the laughably unstable previews where mice would go crazy. I don’t remember exactly what the tool was called, but I was an MCSE back then and had the big binder of MS discs, so I would build my own windows ISOs with a bunch of the built in drivers stripped out and slip stream other packages like Firefox in. Would end up with core installs of only a few hundred MBs. Did the same with XP when it came out, but I started daily driving Ubuntu around 2004 and I left Windows behind for the most part with the exception of work.
I’m sure battery life is still better with Windows, but it’s not enough to make me want to go back to it, I’d probably pick up a Mac before that happens.
I wish I was old enough to have access to install NT on the family compute at the time. My aunt and uncle had ME and it was bad enough that i knew to keep it off my family’s machine. Instead I stuck with 98 SE until XP and it gave me an excuse to build a new machine at the same time.
Vista was fine. I never had any issues.
It was during this time the transition to 64 bit systems became necessary to deal with needing to have more than 4GB of memory which was not helped by Vista using 2GB just to run, iirc. If you ran Vista 32 bit you had memory problems. If you ran Vista 64 bit you had major compatibility problems. It wasn’t until the end of Vista’s life did 64 bit go mainstream.
What can I say? I had a laptop with Vista pre-installed and it was fine.
Vista was amazing and 8/8.1 was refreshing. Also, Vista introduced hardware accelerated desktop rendering in Windows, finally no more tearing. I enjoyed using them. I personally haven’t had any gripes with any of the recent Windows versions.
I was helping my grandma with her old laptop that had Windows 8 and let me tell you, I only wanted to punch the screen 4 times!
Worst of both worlds.
Win10 beats it by a mile.
Only way to make the win better would be more privacy.
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.
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.
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
SteamOS has a normal linux desktop, its only in deck mode where everything is deck specific
Yeah, it’s just Arch with KDE plasma
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.
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!
Gotta wonder how that affects older games that haven’t been updated since…
When no longer supporting Ubuntu 16.04: No big deal, just update, duh…
When no longer supporting Windows 7/8: How dare you!
People paid for particular product on a particular platform. That’s what they will get sued over. People made a contract with steam for product that runs on a platform. That’s just contract law.
Valve are the ones who require tethering to their magical drm cloud - not my copy of ‘Monkey Island’.
so just like they were sued over axing Windows XP support, right?
“Valve Software has joined the ranks of Microsoft, Sony and Electronics Arts by requiring Steam users to waive their right to file a lawsuit against the company in order to use the digital distribution platform. The company made the announcement on Tuesday, saying that Steam’s new dispute resolution terms allow customers to only bring individual claims, not class action claims.”
Exactly.
On a particular platform - that platform is Steam, not Windows 7/8
