Sorry, if you don't use antivirus, how do you know that you don't have viruses at all? Many of them work stealthily exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities. If they didn't do something visible for you then you just have a luck now, but it may run out any time.

I know how most of the viruses act. I had to learn this because it was related to my work in the past. And luck has nothing to do with it.

Hell, some people stil bitch that GOG does not support XP...
LInux is a good OS but Wndows is easier for people who are not computer geeks to use.
And.no doubt, some Linux users are cultlike in their devotion and the way theyinsult anybody who is not a Linux user.

BTW IH ave two compouters using a monitor/mouse,Keyboars/switch;One running Windows 10 the other Wnndows 7.

Folks, truth is the Windows 7 users no longer constituite a big enough market share to justify continuing support.
As anybody chekcing the market share figure for Desktop Computer Os;s would know.
Os's do not last forever.
I was suprised by how smal a share of the market..a little above 2% Linux has. The Linux users keep telling us how it is the Next BIg Thing.....

Indeed, I remember many posts on this very same forum complaining about that exact thing.

And now history is repeating itself again with the exact same kind of complaints related to the death of Windows 7 which are now cropping up in spades just like they used to do for Windows XP back in the day.

I can understand why people want to hang on to an old OS that they prefer; however, the reality is that doing so is simply not viable for various reasons (major security problems, lack of hardware support, lack of software support, etc. etc.).

Everybody is going to have to change OS'es eventually. That's just the way it is.

Well, things have definity been a bit more easy back then, when access to certain system components was not restricted or certain technology levels simply didn't exist.
A lot of what today we take for granted (let's take the mpeg2 video codecs for example) back then had to be installed manually. But then one could also decide not to install these things at all.

Having a old computer with a old OS for old games is a nice thing.

Expecting that modern software works on old stuff is quite silly however.

Oh yeah, and all these shenanigans already happened once, with valve dropping support for Windows XP. Did that trigger discussions on how DRM can affect the playability of games that due to the way they're programmed only really work best on XP? No.

Instead, those who wanted to make use of their steam subscriptions upgraded, no real discussions were triggered in the internet space at the time, and people keep shilling for Valve's launcher.

Even GOG will eventually ditch Win7 themselves if they haven't already, the only difference is that installers (as of this moment anyway) would continue to work.

It's already happened. They've stated they do not test for Win 7 compatibility for games.

It's the biggest thing most people never hear about. A lot more likely than not, it is powering this store we are buying games from and its forum we are writing on. It's also very likely to be in your router.

But heaven forbid that a nice, free, unrestricted, publicly transparent thing enter the mainstream's consciousness. That would be scary.

An OS is something that you should pay for and it should place arbitrary restrictions on what you can do with your computer. Also, despite the fact that it powering critical functions for society, its internals should only be visible to one private company and otherwise free of any public scrutiny (except for hackers reverse-engineering it looking for exploits of course, these are fine).

Not entirely accurate.
The games as such would probably start just fine, at least most of them would, but if the launcher is the only way to download the games with, you have no access to those games on Windows 7, or even Windows 8 (which is all the time forgotten in these recent Steam discussions).

You don't even get to the point where it's necessary to worry about whether a game will run or not, because you can't access your purchases.

(Completely irrelevant, but I'm using Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 10 on different computers.)

And that's a valid complaint.
Not that GOG site or Galaxy or whatever should run on XP, but there's no real reason why GOG couldn't offer some legacy versions of their older game catalogue that people could try to run on older computers.

I have an old Windows XP desktop somewhere, and an old Windows 2000 laptop somewhere, so I could try to play some older games on older hardware, but if they only offer versions which are patched to the point where no kind of backward compatibility exits, I should go to some abandonware sites to get older versions, even if I own a legal copy on GOG.

I wasn't talking so much about future installations but about current installations becoming unusalbe.

You can install the games with the current version of the launcher, then either backup them with it or just rar them.
So you have something like our offline installers. If you don't upgrade the launcher you will be fine.

But if Steam ever changes the network protocol making the old launcher useless, then even these backups won't run anymore since the launcher won't grant them permission.


edit: removed doppelmoppel