The funniest part for me is, that almost none of these people are complaining about MS dropping windows 7, and treating it as if it was valves fault

My 'I should install Linux' moment was when I realised that Debian had significantly newer packages than what I had installed on my Windows 10 PC.

why stop at a valve lawsuit? may as well sue microsoft, nvidia, intel, oracle and any other companies that stopped updating win7 software components

I got very comfortable in Windows 7. I knew a lot of ways to customize and tailor my experience, I had the registry edits, the whole nine yards. When Windows 8 came out, I figured I'd just wait for Windows 9 and upgrade to that. Then Windows 10 turned out to be a security nightmare, so I said screw it and, thanks to a friend I had at the time who was into Linux, I came to the dark side. And now I've been daily driving Linux for more of my life than I have Windows. Feels great.

I like the guy who doesn't have a computer capable of running Windows 10 but does have 10 lawyers.

Windows 11 was the last straw. Pissed me off so much I went straight to Arch, and replaced VS Code with Neovim. This is after using nothing but Windows for over 15+ years. Now I'm on NixOS (I get all of the benefits of Arch plus being able to sleep peacefully knowing that I will always have a working system, and an organized config with useful comments.).

Went from Win7 to Debian and never looked back.

Windows 7 EoL is when I went to Linux forever.

"They're gamers. They're lazy." Ooof, felt the shockwave on that one. Haha!

If one cannot afford to upgrade their PC or OS, I doubt they can afford a lawyer.

Steam announcing support dropping for 7 was what made me switch to Linux And it was the best decision I ever made regarding computer software

It’s possible to move to linux, to avoid upgrading the PC or the proprietary OS. The issue here is more the DRM than Steam itself - since the games themselves can run on the old windows machines. DRM is so freaking normalized on the gamer world, that people are freaking out on Steam, not on the misery of DRM and launchers.

Been trolling my friend about this for a while now, waving a Debian 12 installer disk in his face. He knows i am inevitable.

See you in a few years when Windows 10 becomes EOL.

"Me and my 10 lawyers!" I wonder, if all these lawyers were with him in the room at the moment of writing his passionate message.

I'd say that there are cases where Linux isn't a solution. The older Optimus laptops. On Windows, they could have enough power to run stuff like Battlefield, but they won't be able to do so on Linux because they don't have Vulkan support. Very sad thing indeed. Also Valve could probably just disable the store page for those people with W7, since it's the only thing that actually is a web-page. But then those users won't be able to buy games, which is exactly the thing Valve wants their users to do, sooooo yeah....

The real news for me here is that apparently Valve supported Windows XP from the very beginning to 2019. That's just mind boggling considering that the Windows XP was released on 2001. The Windows release schedule is picking up pace again and the support periods are also getting shorter which seems to have come as a surprise for many users who got used to the "forever-1 day" support promises of the past decade. Also this highlights another issue which is that most people back then traded freedom for convenience over digital downloads and have seemingly forgotten the company end of the bargain they signed up for.

"Bro. Bro. You just don't understand, I'm a POWER USER so THATS why I still use Windows 7." t. never touched command prompt and only browses the internet with their computer

Linux Mint 21.3 out in a week... embracing you with open arms ^^

Valve really isn't the one to blame here. If you really want to point fingers, point them at either the Chromium project or Microsoft. The end of life for Windows 7 is completely beyond Valve's control, as is Chromium requiring dependencies that Windows 7 doesn't have. Technology is progressing, and will continue progressing. Valve needs to drop support in order to continue development of Steam. Many people are holding on to Windows 7 for dear life, and I really don't know if many of them understand how much of a risk that is. Not trying to spread FUD, Things might seem safe for now, but it's only a matter of time before someone finds an RCE attack that can be triggered with little effort, and when they do, it's all over. Antivirus can't do much for you then. I totally get having a Windows 7 or older machine laying around for old offline legacy programs or retro games. I am guilty of having many older computers in my house for that exact reason. But how one can completely justify running a 14 year old unsupported OS as a daily driver is beyond me. EDIT: Original comment was garbage. I barely got sleep so it was all over the place. (Not like this will be any better).

To be fair Australia pretty much decided that the whole steam 'service' thing was just BS to get around consumer law and that by OUR law steam games are products. This decision was originally over lack of refunds (I'm 90% sure the reason we still don't have steam decks sold here is that Valve is still salty over this). So while this might hold no water with the US ombudsman the possibility exists that someone might be successful suing in Australia.

I'm a Win 7 holdout. I abstained from "upgrading"to Win10 due to a number of reasons including injected ads and privacy concerns. I'm at the point where a number of my frequently used applications are no longer supported for their latest versions. I've decided to throw myself into the deep end and install arch into a fresh HDD. I'm a little worried that I'm going to struggle with fault-finding when i enevitably make a mistake, but i still think it's the correct choice for me.

I think a crucial point though is that the library and game launching functionality isnt in the same boat as the store. Valve probably could provided a frozen version of steam that cant load external websites but can launch games

*Windows 7 Neckbeards :* CLASS ACTION LAWSUITS ARE COMING, VALVE! *Also Windows 7 Neckbeards :* Unable to spend any money for newer hardware.

Valve should add a label beside that red bar saying "What to do?" with a link to some Linux installation guide

Brodie over here drinking Windows 7 tears

I would honestly also want a "Steam lite". Something that has the bare minimum to have the launcher, and friends list. No overlay necessarily, store can be used on web, and that's it. Something that wouldn't hog memory for those 4gb laptops that still are a thing for whatever reason.

I used Windows 7 on a thinkpad from 2010 until 2022. Windows 10 was barely usable and in the end i upgraded to it until i could get a new laptop. If you still use Windows 7 i believe Linux with Wine and Proton on steam is genuinely a good option.

Steam is still DRM. Tyranny of the benevolent.

I took the leap from Win7 to Linux in Oct 2019 because I bought Ryzen 2600X that Win7 didn't have drivers for. And that was the best leap I've ever done! If a game doesn't work in Linux with minimum tinkering isn't worth to spend my time with.

So, is Valve doing something to prevent these people from keeping their Steam client on a version that still works and not just refusing to support Win7 for newer versions? Because that's a pretty dick move if so.

Why aren't we hearing about these class action lawsuits? Because there's no sane lawyer who thinks such a case has a chance.

The only problem with your final question is that many if not most Win7 era GPUs won’t support Vulkan, which means you need a beefy GPU. This isn’t a defense of Win7 purists. Win10 is the minimum safe version of Windows, and there are program’s like Chris Titus Tech’s utility to remove components you don’t like, allowing you to make it as unsafe as you need to feel safe.

I'm honestly sympathetic to those still on Windows 7, and would still be on it myself if I didn't switch to Linux back in 2013/2014 and then stop using Windows entirely. I loathe the look and design of Windows 10 and 11, and I've had non-stop issues with Windows 11 when I do have to use it for work. While I do keep a copy of Windows 10 around on my home PC for the few games I can not run on Linux, but that number has been decreasing over time. (I don't use Windows 11 at my home PC because I both refuse to enable TPM and given my experiences with Windows 11, I would rather not). Windows 7 was the last good looking and decent OS released from Microsoft. I also don't deal well with change, especially change that was prompted by outside factors and might seem sudden and unexpected. I get into a routine, I setup things how I like it, and I don't touch it unless I have to do so. (This is also why I still run x11 as opposed to wayland, in addition to me fundamentally disliking it's development process, its missing features, and also that I run Nvidia GPUs and use the proprietary drivers, which sway does not support.). So I can understand where some of these people are coming from. (Although if anyone can get a distro to look and feel like almost exactly like a copy of Windows 7, I imagine that many people would be willing to try it out. I certainly would).

The effort spent on making things run with XP actually makes a bit of sense though - there's a certain range of older XP games that are quite annoying to run on Vista and newer (especially with a 64bit OS), sometimes even almost (but not quite) requiring old GPUs as well!

Interesting Linux Mint wasn’t mentioned as an option which often is the go to recommendation for old Windows PCs. Maybe the lack of Wayland support, lol (they did just start having it for preview or something).

I haven't kept up with this but the combined Intel integrated and discrete nvidia gpu was a huge issue for Linux. And what do many of those old laptops have, that setup exactly.

It's amusing when people realize that their games aren't actually theirs. Looking again at terrible frame rate of Demon's Souls for my ancient PS3 (physical copy, 1st slim model), I come to the conclusion that the nuisance is a cheap price to pay, in opposite of not being able to play it at all.

I kinda miss Windows 7. It is the first OS I ever used, and I have some good childhood memories with it.

“I can’t afford to upgrade to Windows 10 so you will hear from my 10 lawyers.”

"I can't afford to upgrade, but I've got ten lawyers..."

Imagine willingly running an operating system that hasn't had any security updates for nearly four years (or 1 year for enterprise users that got an extension).

I'm glad I moved to Linux in 1998.

There is a Windows 10 version that is officially supported up until 2032, its called IoT Enterprise LTSC (yea I know long name), but it also doesn't come with a lot of the bloatware that stock Win10 has OOTB.

I do suspect that steam ending support for older copies of windows will greatly help people either switch to linux or upgrade to 10/11

Windows techies are more like techpriests than technicians :P Not their fault, obviously, it's what you have to do in that context. But still.

One of my house mates is a die hard Win 7 user. Refuses to upgrade or even consider Linux. He is starting to run into problems were the latest versions of web browsers will not run. I have tried to explain the reality of the situation for him but he wont hear it.

Valve should release an ultralight version of steam that should come as a separate binary (exe?) That can only show the mini-mode(small picture mode?)which is already built in that is just the game-list

Hi brodie, as an ex potato PC user (intel pentium E3500 with gma graphics) I wanted to tell you the main reason why I think Linux is not a viable option for some of this W7 users with old pcs: Graphics APIs, linux is awesome for older hardware in except in this one. The difference between having d3d9 and not having it is like night and day, on linux you only have opengl(so proton is completly out of question) on this computers wich is not viable for d3d9 games. And its not only games, without d3d9 you also lose dxva so videos will play slower and if you say vaapi no, its not always there just search for intel gm45 vaapi support (only works in arch). Cheers.

Counterpoint: linux is gay.

Don't accept the corporate redefinition of what buying a thing means. Sure it's technically a license described in the 10 million page EULA nobody reads, but the redefinition of "buying" as "you pay us money and we can take away your stuff at any time" is garbage being pushed by the largest corporations and their bootlickers. That being said, Valve usually abides by the common understanding of what "buying" something means - in that you buy that thing and get to keep it. Everything else in the video is fine, it's just odd to see this sort of rhetoric coming out of what I'm assuming is a Linux focused channel.

Here before the Windows community enters the comments Kinda makes sense, though: Windows 10 broke game compatibility for a bunch of games in various ways, such as introducing bugs in old Touhou games iirc, and in the Sonic scene certain fangames crashing trying to play cutscenes on Windows 10 as two examples of compatibility-breaks.

"stream will stop working on windows 7, 8, and 8.1" "hey everyone let's stop using steam on windows 7, 8, and 8.1, that'll show them!"

They may have a point - especially if there are games that won't work after updating, computers incapable of running anything newer, and/or reasons not to upgrade(for example, Windows 10 spyware😉). Upgrading to Linux or (for a given quantity of the term "upgrade") Windows 10, or Windows 11 simply is not an option for some, and if this ends up killing DRM, then I certainly won't be complaining. As a Debian user though, I will not have a horse in this race.

I remember the time Win XP stopped being supported. I've kept using it until the day I could use the banking website rejecting me just like that. Had a touch with Linux at school so gave it a try before to buy a pc/licence and managed to found my way with Lubuntu 16.04 after distro hopping from Debian then Xubuntu. (I've kept that desktop just in case but well Core 2 Duo). Later bought a laptop with Win 8.1, and later multibooted with Linux Mint. That laptop is broken now unfortunately but have a light cheap one with LMDE. Now my main pc is a Tuxedo desktop with Ubuntu and enjoying it like real.

Vista and even XP users can continue to use certain old versions of steam if they prevent steam from auto updating itself. Windows 7 will likely be the same and people will write guides and supply downloads for old versions that can still run on 7 and howe to prevent steam from Auto updating (its just a config file setting)

They don't care if microsoft doesnt support it. As long as it runs they'll keep using and if they cant be bothered to go to 10 or 11 they definitely wont be bothered to deal with Linux

These w7 karens are pretty hilarious.

These people are not psychos, They just expect to be able to play the games they purchased on the hardware and operating system they purchased them for. That is actually a very reasonable and rational expectation.

~~and this is why i use windows 98, they will take years to get past my version number~~

On the one hand, I like that people are pissed that their games can just be taken from them based on what OS they're using and that they feel a right to use those games regardless. On the other hand, they're absolutely brain-dead for not seeing that Steam is absolutely able to force a switch-over for the Steam client. The question is really only regarding the licenses and/or one's right to continued use of the software products associated.

Yeah sue steam for stopping win7 support, not microsoft for producing completely new versions of windows that have specific system requirements.

Okay but they have a point about not being able to launch their games, and saying "you signed a license agreement" is a level of bootlicking that I won't do. They have a system that can run a game, that now cannot, all because the software on their PC is forcing them to update. I haven't bought a game on steam in like 3 years because of that license agreement, but it doesn't make it any less shit that they've done this. Also, this kind of behavior will inevitably contribute to e-waste, Yes, people can stop using steam, or stop using windows 7, hell, they can pirate all their games for the foreseeable future for all I care. None of those are solutions to the problem, they're adaptations to a problem that has become industry standard: You not owning your software.

I think the funniest moment for me in this vid was when that one poster made the claim that Valve is being paid by MS to drop support for legacy Windows xD. Valve, the company that is actively trying to detach from Windows dependency by making Linux gaming actually possible is in MS pockets xD. Edit: Also, you can actually download your Steam games and go into offline mode permanently, effectively having that library as offline library for as long as that PC stays alive. And then you can clone that hard drive to move that library to a new device.

I'm still on Windows 7 on my desktop because a lot of the games I love playing are old stuff with heavy modding capabilities or very hackish, and I've had severe problems trying to do things in a Windows 10 or later environment. The OS just loves to screw it up and put barriers in place, when I know what I am doing and why I am doing it. I simply cannot reliably do anything I normally do in any other version of windows reliably, which is nothing to say of the other issues of system bloat and terrible OS performance over time (I really did try running windows 10 for years, it was a complete disaster no matter what I did). Now I use fedora silverblue on a laptop, and am in the process of turning my desktop to into a Debian 12 machine with a windows 7 VM for all my older games using GPU passthrough.

I feel these guys' pain, I got annoyed when I realized Valve dropped support for 32-bit systems, even on Linux. I had a couple old laptops, one was 1.6GHz Atom N270 and could play a couple games without much problem, it could even run Windows 10! (When its crappy ipod hard drive worked) The other was a 600MHz Celeron 3 btw, runs Antix Linux pretty well But now I'm playing most of them on more recent machines anyway, so I stopped caring. If Valve ever drops Windows 10, though, I'm jumping to Linux for sure

I am no longer a gamer (was somewhat back in XP days),and I do not use Steam. I still use Windows 7 on a 10 yr old PC for certain hardware and software I use. When Win 7 went EOL, I installed a second drive in that same PC to run Linux as a dual boot type setup. Some of my thoughts from this video 1) Regarding the Win 7 Steam gamers' comments. They do seem to come across as not understanding tech very deeply. My question is what the heck happened to gamers? When I was a somewhat gamer, gaming gave me incentive to learn more deeply about my computer, OS, game configs, etc. Main purpose was to "coax" that last bit of performance, or to "force" the game to do something better, or rearrange aircraft control panels, etc. I learned computing on MS-Dos back in the day, then my work did not involve any computers till XP era. I bought a 3 yr old machine from my friend, then had to learn XP. Once learned, gaming and flight simming encouraged me to learn more "geeky side of tech" to make my gaming experience way better/more realistic. Do modern day Windows gamers not care about this stuff? Or just not care to learn? (Note: I know that does not apply to Linux gamers, Linux gamers wish to learn all the ins/outs of tech, OS, games, etc). 2) Do they not know they could install a second disk in their rig and run Linux for their daily and keep Win 7 for special use cases (as I did)? I learned how to do so by reading articles, watching videos, then doing it. You don't need to go to some special school or university. As gamers I would expect them to be "techy" and be interested in such things. 3) Not actually owning (or possessing) games, media, etc is exactly why I stopped gaming. The games I occasionally play are all physical copies owned and held by me (or if not physical copies then at least downloaded and stored locally on my PC. Same with my music, etc.I do not use any SaaS type stuff. (I am fine with buying software initially, one time pay then it is mine. Not an ongoing subscription). My backups are stored local, not on clouds. (I do have a few WW2 aircraft flight manuals in cloud storage. I did that when I was learning how cloud works, so I would know how to use cloud storage if the need or desire ever arose). I am not downing anyone's use of Steam, games as subscriptions, etc. For myself I choose not to use any of those for this very reason in the video. Some company or corpo suddenly denying me access to things I paid for. We all have to take time to read TOS of stuff, as boring as that is. 4) I never studied Steam that hard, so I was surprised to learn it uses Google Chrome to operate. 5)You would also think maybe gamers would know about "Sometimes the current in the deep blue sea will carry you places" if not willing to try Linux or another OS. 6) Just a note: Yes I totally subscribe to the Louis Rossman quip "I will own everything...and they will be pissed".

Another point for pirate games i would say - no steam needed, running fine on whatever the game has as minimal requirements. everyone happy! Also: any box able to run windows 7 can just upgrade to 10; it will be fine - welcome to the future.

While I wouldn't run Win7 outside of a virtual machine or air-gapped machine, I gotta admire people still running the OS. They're crazy, yes, but they've got spirit. If by some miracle a judge doesn't dismiss the class-action suit, I'd be curious to see how it will end.

I was running windows XP when I first got steam, modern warfare 2 in 2009. Damn, those were the days.

I don't understand what it is with Windows users and aggressively refusing to upgrade...

I think its a fair gripe that you can't play your games bought from steam on original, period-correct hardware and OS for the game you bought. I also don't think its fair to force Valve to support a dead OS. There needs to be some middle ground where Steam either disables DRM for older titles or at least allows some sort of offline authentication. As much as I would like to take this opportunity to tell people to use Linux, that is not the long term solution here. One day, in 2032, Ubuntu 22.04 (yes I use Ubuntu, bite me) will be end of life. For all I know by then none of my existing hardware will be compatible with any modern OS. Am I just screwed out of using my current computer then, if I so choose? I realize that in the digital age its hard to fully preserve any moment in time, but that doesn't mean these companies have to make it harder to do so. On the flip side, I don't foresee game compatibility on Steam getting any worse in the future even as Windows continues to age like fine moldy cheese. This is in large part due to Wine/Proton working as a great compatibility tool not only for modern apps but especially for older apps who's APIs won't be changing any further. If you are concerned about being able to play your Steam games in the future, Linux is probably the best place to be for that. However, it doesn't change the fact that the best compatibility for any piece of software will always be the original OS it was written for.

I do have both Windows XP and 7 machines, but both only connect to my NAS to browse movies, nothing else. No browsers, no mainline internet

I will give my perspective as a Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Linux user, also someone who really dislikes Windows 10 and 11. Windows 7 and 8.1 still run OK and it's not like I have been installing updates anyway. Similar for Windows 10 - I installed it on one PC, took a while to disable all telemetry and other bloat then obviously disabled updates so that stuff does not come back. Now, my game PC can dual boot into Linux and games run quite well on Linux, except some games. For example, Derail Valley runs at 10-20FPS on Linux and at 30-60FPS on Windows 8.1 on the same exact hardware (dual boot) so it is unplayable on Linux (FPS on Linux stay about the same with different graphics settings). There is another thing - I do not ask for new games to run on Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. I ask for the games that I bought and paid for to run on the computer that I ran them the first time on. It's an old game, one that runs on Windows 7 (and may not even run on Windows 10), why am I prevented from running it? Well, for the games that do not run well on Linux, I'll have to find a way to crack those games so I can play the game I paid for. Yay. Maybe next time I'll skip the paying part and just pirate the game instead. Now I have to make my laptop dual boot (Windows 7/Linux) and probably deal with lower game performance (and the hardware already is not super fast as the laptop is 9 years old). Or maybe I'll just pirate the games I want to play. Some I already paid for, others, well, maybe the game is on gog and does not have the problem or maybe I can just pirate it.

Imagine having 10 lawyers at your disposal, but not enough money to upgrade your PC.

Windows 7 User here! My computer shat itself into not working for a year or so a week after upgrading it to Win 10 and I was stuck with a shitty laptop that was meant to be my mom's for the following year until we found someone who could fix it. After that, I just kinda refused to upgrade it out of paranoia it would probably make things worse again. At the present time that decade old low-end all-in-one machine takes ten minutes worth of tries to turn on (I think it might be a power cable problem but I don't know enough to say for sure) and I only turn it on whenever I embark on a file transfering session to my Google Drives. I'm saving for a laptop of my own that's just functional enough to run whatever basic video editing programs the carreer I'm studying in university will require me to use (I do most of my actual real life editing on my phone through capcut). I'll have to dual boot for a couple of years in case I'm forced to use any specific programs that Linux doesn't support and Wine can't help me with, but I'm absolutely installing a Linux distro (probably either Mint or AntiX) on it day one and deleting Win10 or 11 (whichever the computer comes with) the day after I graduate.

What you see of the Steam Client is not the entire client; there is still a lot of native code in the backend, and networked code may be dependent on operating system certificates and security libraries. By the way, you can still pay the DOSBox mode of Doom 1993 outside the Steam Client because it's a DRM-free, open source emulator.

While Windows 7 holdouts are clearly unreasonable, dropping support for older versions of Windows does create a real issue of some games that are still sold on Steam not running on Windows 10/11 out of the box. This was already raised as an issue back when Windows XP support was removed. If the developers/publishers don't update such games then Steam should provide a warning that a game won't run out of the box. GOG is a lot more proactive in these cases sometimes pre-applying existing fan fixes to their versions of old games. Regarding Windows 7 holdouts, in my experience there are two main types: 1. people who are just not tech-savvy and think that moving to Windows 10 will require buying a new computer or know they can install Windows 10 but are afraid of "breaking" their computer. 2. people who refuse to upgrade over privacy issues while somehow thinking that Windows 7 is "safe". I can sympathize with the first group as when I was inexperienced I also was afraid of breaking things. In hindsight it feels a bit silly but if you don't have a lot of money and don't have a friend/family member who is tech-savvy and can help you then I can see how installing Windows can feel like a daunting task and how it may feel safer to "not fix what's not broken". Bottom line is that aside from running old software that doesn't work on modern versions of Windows or in WINE there is no reason to use Windows 7 any more especially considering that Windows 10 has the same official hardware requirements as Windows 7 and that any PC running Windows 7 can run Linux as there are lightweight distros with lower requirements than Windows 7.

I mainly use Linux for everything, but I still have a few Windows PCs kicking about if I want to do a little bit of retro gaming. Often times I like playing these old games on era accurate hardware, or in some cases I like chucking new games on them just to see how hard they struggle to run; sometimes with surprising results. So steam no longer supporting Windows 7 is a bit of a bummer for me, but it was to be expected. Might try using the cmd tool for the hell of it just to get some of these old games running on proper hardware again. I've tried running PC games through Linux using Wine a few times, usually with mixed results. Recently played a bit of Rayman 2 on an era accurate PC with Linux (because I thought it would be funny), and unfortunately it ran at below average speeds and the controller mapping got screwed-up. Probably doing something wrong, and I'll try again some other time with Proton to see if that runs any better.

I would say that on MacOS side of things, Steam should make a seperate Client for High Sierra or Mojave, as those are the last versions of MacOS you can play 32 bit games on. So when Mojave support ends in next year, it would be literally impossible to play all 32 bit MacOS Steam games forever.

the steam client being a bloated piece of shit web client is hardly a reason to defend the fact that valve will no longer support it on windows 7. instead of defending valve's god-awful client, we should be shaming valve for not having a minimal steam client option available, or a command line version of steam that does nothing but authenticates the DRM for their games and lets you run them, allowing anyone to play their games on whatever kind of machine is capable of running them, without a multi-gigabyte-of-ram-hogging client just sitting there, doing nothing, often taking up more resources than a game itself, particularly if the game is older. the fact that the steam client itself can be a reason to stop people from playing games they paid for that their machine would otherwise be perfectly happy to run, is straight up despicable. it is either malice, or gross negligence on valve's part. there's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. there's no sane way to defend valve's restrictive scheme that artificially stamps out sections of people from being able to play the game they paid for on the machine they had when they bought it, and in the name of what exactly? pushing and fetishizing their resource-hogging glorified social media client that many people won't need or want? with no way to avoid using it, forced to just have it just sit there like a bloated monstrosity standing in the way of you and your games? how can anyone defend that? ah yes, that critical component necessary to play any game: google chrome. no matter how you slice and dice it, this is just straight up malice or negligence on valve's part on every front

I have a laptop that isn't supported by windows 11 so i gave Linux mint a try, i run my windows games i have on steam and the proprietary camera software through bottles and everything else i do on the laptop has a Linux equivalent that works fine for me.

Imagine using Windows 7 when you can use Windows XP or Windows 98

The day I've 100% switched to Linux was weird. My PC had 8GB of RAM (which was a lot) and Windows XP x64 was broken and Windows 7 just launched even more broken (people tends to remember Win7 well but at launch it was a mess like every other windows launch. Well, for some reason on Windows 7 my screen was out of alignment and on Windows XP x64 a lot of things didn't worked. I've already was running Linux but I've stay mostly on Windows. That time Linux x64 was a clusterfuck worse than Windows but Linux had PAE which allows you to run something like 32GB on 32 bits using page swap or banking. After an afternoon tired of trying to fix it, I've said: fuck it. And just formatted everything, installed I think it was Ubuntu 32 Bits with PAE and never looked back hahaha. I was already a gamer and at some time in place I was even a maintainer for a lot of games on WineHQ. I was a teen so I didn't have any programming skills but I wrote tons of guides and support tickets on that platform. I've totally missed Windows 7 and mostly Windows 10. Some years down the line I've come back to installing Windows 10 as dual boot but I was so unused to Windows that at that point it feels weird, I would even say hard to use. Today I'm a little more used to Windows by using it on VMs but I would not go back to it. It just not working for me anymore. What all this have to do with the post in question? Just the reminder of a teen me begging at valve forums to add support for two or three titles (I think CS and gmod at the time) to linux while the only way to play was with a beta release of Wine, loosing 50% of performance and hoping nothing crashes and now seeing people on Windoss 7 begging to have support for something I take for granted... Things change.

Only valid reason not to switch to Linux is if your PC doesn't support Vulkan

There's another reason: Steam also relies on Qt and Qt 6 only supports Windows 10 or later.

tales from my tech support job 2: the same exact thing is likely going to happen with win10. we no longer sell win10 licenses with our computers as it is eol but if i took a shot for the amount of times that people have complained to us regarding that id be dead on the spot. the funny thing is, win11 is literally just win10 with a new ui and questionable security features

I have an old computer running headless with Windows 7 for a handful of applications that don't run well with wine. I've been using Steam as a remote desktop client for it since it performs a lot better than VNC. It is kind of annoying that Valve is dropping support for Windows 7 but it is understandable why they need to do it. It would be nice if their streaming host software could be run independent of the main client itself though.

lmao people saying the Linux powered, by default, Steam Deck is the problem.

I found a post on the Steam forums implying that Microsoft actually does still support Windows 7 because they own Blizzard and Blizzard's launcher still supports Windows 7, and another post implying that Steam will also stop supporting Linux because the website said they have to update to windows 10. The amount of almost-willful misinformation around this issue is insane.

Honestly, I'm with Louis Rossman on that one. This is part and parcel of that whole "You will own nothing" trend, where you pay you enough money that you should get to own your stuff - but then the seller can still take away your ability to use it remotely via software updates whenever they feel like it. I can absolutely understand the anger of these posters. Just because Steam can get away with that legally doesn't mean it's a good thing. Mind you, I'm writing this from a Gentoo Linux computer. I'm not directly affected by this, and I wouldn't recommend people to connect a Windows 7 machine to the Internet in 2023. But that doesn't mean that what's happening here is okay or a good thing. Steam is selling these games as if that sale "forever", and if there is some fineprint in the license that boils down to "actually, it's just until we don't feel like it anymore, lol", that should be a scandal, not an opportunity for KZfaqrs to point their fingers at the victims and laugh.

So these people "can't afford new laptops", but they can afford lawyers?

microsoft ending support for windows 7 is why i switched to linux. I didn't want to "upgrade" to a newer windows version due to privacy concerns.

Second comment: remember the old news stories about parents complaining the SNES was a scam because they had a perfectly good NES at home?

Love one of the comments on the post highlighted at 9:54 that says "people playing on windows 95 should get compensated as well." Great trolling of the OP. This issue is the problem with modern digitally available gaming vs. physical media. I have come to accept this reality (reluctantly) and that's why I'm now happy that I'm running linux and can stay up to date more easily.

I used to keep in contact with someone who is *currently* running Windows XP on their daily use machine that connects to the internet. They spend their free time coding shims to make random apps work on this mess. In case running Windows 7 in 2023 wasn’t psycho enough.

people fighting over some trivial games even thinking of lawsuit damnnnn, they are living a very lavish life and have nothing to worry about

I got to the part where i have to open the steam from the files and log in, but in my case the login screen opens but stays in a grey screen and never loads

I'm calling it now. Some Win7 nerd is going to stumble across this video and hear "gamers are too lazy". "Oh yeah? I'll show em!" Brodie will appear in court as a star witness, and confuse the jury with his non-stop talk of Linux, with Gabe sitting in the doc, gently crying to himself, "I just like video games, please make the stupidity stop" :(

One time I spoke to a win 7 user, and when I said that running an unsupported operating system was insecure, they just said that they’re fine because they run Norton or something.