GZDoom 4.12.2 released

[Redneckerz]

I don't understand why these folks are saying "break it".

But the post you refer to didn't say that?

[phantombeta]

I don't understand why these folks are saying "break it".

But the post you refer to didn't say that?

The post that spawned the topic did:

Unpopular opinion: Windows 7 support should be removed.

[Xterra]

I don't understand why these folks are saying "break it".

But the post you refer to didn't say that?

I know. My point was that I didn't understand why people are saying to break something that works, when there's no end benefit or spared headache at this point in time. It works, it doesn't harm anything, so why break it just because you're feeling capricious?

Down the line? Yeah, sure, I can understand it being a pisser for the dev team to keep support for an aging OS, and I regard that as an inevitability for a game engine that's always in active development. But for the meantime, it doesn't NEED to be broken. Graf himself said as much, Rachel agreed, so they actually *restored* Win7 support in 4.12.2 with a simple change. So what's there to gain from deliberately breaking it because "it's not the new thing, therefore is bad"?

EDIT: Sorry for the necrobump! You can tell I don't visit here often...

[Professor Hastig]

Down the line? Yeah, sure, I can understand it being a pisser for the dev team to keep support for an aging OS, and I regard that as an inevitability for a game engine that's always in active development. But for the meantime, it doesn't NEED to be broken. Graf himself said as much, Rachel agreed, so they actually *restored* Win7 support in 4.12.2 with a simple change. So what's there to gain from deliberately breaking it because "it's not the new thing, therefore is bad"?

Deliberately breaking something does not make much sense, of course, especially if it's easily avoided.
But Windows 7 is ancient by now and it's only a matter of time until some dependency makes a change that breaks any chance of continued support.

[Xterra]

Down the line? Yeah, sure, I can understand it being a pisser for the dev team to keep support for an aging OS, and I regard that as an inevitability for a game engine that's always in active development. But for the meantime, it doesn't NEED to be broken. Graf himself said as much, Rachel agreed, so they actually *restored* Win7 support in 4.12.2 with a simple change. So what's there to gain from deliberately breaking it because "it's not the new thing, therefore is bad"?

Deliberately breaking something does not make much sense, of course, especially if it's easily avoided.
But Windows 7 is ancient by now and it's only a matter of time until some dependency makes a change that breaks any chance of continued support.

See, THAT'S fine. If it's broken as a result of actual progress, that's fine and to be expected. I'm well aware that it *will* break eventually.
For now, though, it still works.

[handasa]

HyperAlpha wrote:
> Unpopular opinion: Windows 7 support should be removed.
A lot of people still using Windows 7

[Enjay]

A lot of people still using Windows 7

I think that the survey that is activated on some versions of GZDoom releases provides good feedback as to which operating systems are being used by the userbase. If so, the devs actually have quite an accurate picture of whether "a lot" of people are still using Win7 or not.

Perhaps more importantly, keeping Windows 7 support already requires a bit of "fudging" to keep it. Once MS drops VC++ support for Win7, support for Win7 in GZDoom will probably become untenable. That hasn't happened yet, but it will before too long.

Windows 7 was superseded about 12 years ago (albeit that Win8 was hardly a sparkling example of how to "upgrade" the OS). PCs last a lot longer these days, and I totally get the arguments about people not being able to upgrade their machines for a variety of reasons but, at some point, supporting old tech becomes disproportionately difficult and holds back developments that the majority of the community can benefit from. So, it's not just a casual "Win 7 is old, let's ditch it"; it's more like "Win7 is becoming a problem, we may have to ditch it."

Remember, if you have an older machine running an older OS, you can also run an older version of GZDoom. No one can take that from you. You just won't be able to access new features - just the same as when any software progresses to newer OS versions and leaves the older ones behind. You're not losing anything when Win7 support goes, you're merely not getting something additional.

[Rachael]

I'm surprised we kept Win7 working for as long as we did.

To be quite honest, I still really think that Windows 7 was the last "good" operating system Microsoft ever created. The only thing good about 8/8.1/10/11 are the kernel and HAL stack (including Vulkan and DX12) and the upgrades to it that have happened since 7, but the shell, themes, and UX has gone to utter shit. Not to mention 10/11 has pretty much just become a way for Microsoft to push adverts at this point, which is why they aren't enforcing against piracy with newer versions.

[Graf Zahl]

A lot of people still using Windows 7

I think that the survey that is activated on some versions of GZDoom releases provides good feedback as to which operating systems are being used by the userbase. If so, the devs actually have quite an accurate picture of whether "a lot" of people are still using Win7 or not.

It was 4% last year, to be precise.

I'm surprised we kept Win7 working for as long as we did.

To be quite honest, I still really think that Windows 7 was the last "good" operating system Microsoft ever created. The only thing good about 8/8.1/10/11 are the kernel and HAL stack (including Vulkan and DX12) and the upgrades to it that have happened since 7, but the shell, themes, and UX has gone to utter shit. Not to mention 10/11 has pretty much just become a way for Microsoft to push adverts at this point, which is why they aren't enforcing against piracy with newer versions.

I've never seen an ad in both my Win 11 installs at home and at work. Are they limited to the Home version (which should be avoided at any cost to begin with.)

[Rachael]

It's mostly Copilot and Edge being pushed aggressively, along with Bing - all of this enables the advertising.

They also advertise their own products, i.e. Office, OneDrive, trying to force Microsoft accounts to support the OneDrive pushing, etc.

If you have custom shells and browsers, and removed the Microsoft account linking, and uninstalled OneDrive, there's a chance you can avoid most of this aggressive advertising. But it's almost inavoidable on a default install.

[Graf Zahl]

I have nothing on your list active and of course as a privacy-aware person prefer to use Firefox as my browser.

I would never entrust any data to Microsoft's cloud under any circumstances. I have read in the past about occurences where they snoop around in the stored data and cause trouble.

[Xeotroid]

I've read several accounts of people having their local library/desktop folders switched to OneDrive involuntarily. Because they were random online posts, I can't confirm whether that's what actually happened, a case of "something popped up, just gonna click OK to make it go away" (still awful on MS's part), or something where the people are at fault entirely.

[Rachael]

When I first started using Windows 8 my stuff was switched to OneDrive involuntarily. I made sure to yeet that shit out the back window as quickly as possible.

[Professor Hastig]

I have stopped putting sensitive data into my 'user' folder because of this. So thanks to making the preferred way to work unsafe I'm now back to global folders in the hard drive's root, i.e. what we used before Windows XP...

[Acts 19 quiz]

Not to mention 10/11 has pretty much just become a way for Microsoft to push adverts at this point, which is why they aren't enforcing against piracy with newer versions.

Windows 10 LTSC provides some mitigation lanes around this. Good luck finding and installing it, though. It exists purely to satisfy enterprise customers, and Microsoft really, really doesn't want normal users using it (or even knowing it exists).