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.
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.
