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Hundreds of Thousands of Windows XP and Vista Users Won't Be Able To Use Steam Soon (vice.com)
Windows XP and Vista users have six months to upgrade their operating systems or get the hell off of Steam. From a report: "Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems," Valve, the company that operates Steam, said in a post to its XP and Vista support community. "This means that after that date the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows. In order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to update to a more recent version of Windows."
Microsoft's CEO is currently driving a big push towards an absolutely terrifying "YOU OWN NOTHING" model of cloud computing. Everything - games, media, apps, office and productivity software is supposed to run in the Cloud only, and nothing will install or run locally anymore. Valve's role in all this was to create a completely unnecessary Cloud DRM service - Steam - that nobody asked for or needed, and essentially RAM IT DOWN YOUNG PEOPLE'S THROATS. Young gamers - maybe 500 to 700 million of them now - were supposed to get used to a forced SAAS model of using software while they are young, where there is always a Steam/UPlay/Origin client or similar and no games run at all if you don't have that digital umbilical chord reaching into a cloud DRM service. The reason they did this to gamers is to get them used to the idea that ALL COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE needs to be tied into a Steam like cloud service. Basically, Microsoft is SHITTING all over computing as we from the 1980s/1990s knew it, and Valve either works with them to make it happen, or is actually secretly a Microsoft Company of sorts. What these guys want is a cloud computing model where the paying consumer has ZERO CONTROL over anything anymore - the cloud service allows you to do something, or it doesn't. They are all in on it judging by all the recent cloud news - MS, Nvidia, Valve, Ubisoft and many others. Given how used the Young Ones are now to Steam, Origin and so forth, that cloud strategy will actually happen successfully, until someone with really good lawyers goes to court and shoots the whole thing down. The whole thing can only be described as diabolical if you love computing as it has always been.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Because Steam is partly a DRM solution. Being able to run unpatched versions would allow for crackers to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities which could be used for piracy. Yes it's silly and ineffective like all DRM, but the big publishers, Steam's main customers, want to keep the illusion. Now I don't know what will happen to older games that don't run on Win7, but hopefully Steam will force the developers to upgrade them before the 2019 deadline.
Valve does not not give a damn about its users, never has, and will definitely NOT force ANY developer to provide a Windows 7 version of any older game. Valve will just shrug their shoulders when people who love older games scream that they don't work anymore. These are the people who brought you boxed games in stores that contain only 1 DVD in the box, remember? Steam killed everybody's ability to buy a full, boxed game with complete install discs. Deliberately. For extra profit.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Most of it is in China and on businesses with expensive legacy hardware and software.
I'm typing this on XP. (With an 8-core AMD CPU in a box built only 2 1/2 years ago.) I use Firefox 52. I don't particularly want the WebExtensions version. I have Libre Office 5. Not the newest, but recent. Some things no longer run on XP, but most do. It does nearly everything later Windows can do, at 1/8 the size of Win7, without the Metro tiles of Win8, and without the spyware or forced updates of Win10.
But while I do graphics work, business docs, web design and programming on this machine, I don't use computer games at all. I can see why gamers would think XP is outdated. (Outdated DirectX, for one thing.)
You're spreading fake news my friend.
Any 3rd party application outside of OS can provide TLS1.1 even v1.2 . My XP does support TLS1.2 on my browser.
I removed that malwar vector you call dotNET (.NET), my XP is safer than your modern spying OS. Did you check your NAT router logs on the IP addresses being phoned home by your *modern* OS? Because I did, that's why I fell back to XP.