Steam has now officially stopped supporting Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.
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, ju...
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.
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 OSs get outdated and stop being supported.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...
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.
If you are using steam, there's protondb, where you can check how well game runs on linux
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.
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)
I'm always blown away by how well gaming on Linux is in this era.
Translating into Linux terms, Steam has dropped support for:
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolian
Which came out more than a decade ago, for those who aren't keeping score.
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.
8 and 8.1 is a shame. Best versions if Windows we've ever had.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
When no longer supporting Ubuntu 16.04: No big deal, just update, duh...
When no longer supporting Windows 7/8: How dare you!
Gotta wonder how that affects older games that haven't been updated since....
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."
On a particular platform - that platform is Steam, not Windows 7/8