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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."
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 I can see why gamers would think XP is outdated. (Outdated DirectX, for one thing.)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.