Do people still use Windows 7 for microcontroller work?

[peter-h]

The reality is that currently win7 does everything needed. There will come a time when browsers stop working on it (like happened on XP) and then one will be forced to change. Then one will face issues with old apps; I have this at work currently
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/programming/win7-64-to-win10-upgrade-what-actually-happens/
Some really old XP and pre-XP apps run fine under win7-64 but under win10? Win11 is a bigger problem, because it abandons the MBR partition system.

But if you don't run a browser on that machine, you can run win7 indefinitely...

[nctnico]

Well "only" 25% are still on Win 7.
Maybe what surprises you is that as many have switched to Linux as Mac + Win 10/11.

Yes, both Windows 7 and Linux numbers are surprising. I think many Linux people were on Linux from long ago, but I guess it was less than 40% 15 years ago. It would be interesting to track the dynamics year over year.

The numbers don't surprise me at all. I'm seeing the same trend among my customers. Especially younger software engineers have no problem using Linux to work on embedded projects. Windows has lost the server market a long time ago and now it is losing the software development market as well. If you have to move away from Windows XP / Windows 7 for software development, you might as well switch the Linux. In my experience Linux also works a lot faster to get software compiled.

[peter-h]

I think that may be true if you have little need to do "normal work" (MS Office etc) on the same PC.

[NorthGuy]

I think that may be true if you have little need to do "normal work" (MS Office etc) on the same PC.

I do very little of "normal work". My Excel spreadsheets would certainly work in Libre Office.

For browsing I mostly use Macbook Pro. The hardware is very high quality. Although when they moved to a new OS model with DriverKit and its userspace drivers everything became slow and somewhat buggy.

[NorthGuy]

If you have to move away from Windows XP / Windows 7 for software development, you might as well switch the Linux. In my experience Linux also works a lot faster to get software compiled.

That's what I'm going to do. But I have lots of little programs and tools which I wrote over time. They all will have to be ported. This needs time which I do not have.

[SiliconWizard]

If you have to move away from Windows XP / Windows 7 for software development, you might as well switch the Linux. In my experience Linux also works a lot faster to get software compiled.

That's what I'm going to do. But I have lots of little programs and tools which I wrote over time. They all will have to be ported. This needs time which I do not have.

A lot of them are very likely to run fine with Wine, especailly if those are "little programs and tools", which are likely to use basic Windows stuff.
But you can try booting off a "live" Linux, do some testing and see, before taking the plunge and installing it.

[voltsandjolts]

The two main hurdles for me switching completely to linux are
(1) MS Office
I dislike it. It's deliberately overcomplicated (in features and file formats) so as to hinder folks who wish to move to something else. MS Office did everything I needed around the year 2000. But I'm required to interact with others who use it - that is MS Office's saving grace, the sheer momentum/infiltration it has. Why no MS Office for linux, surely woudn't be much of a port from MacOS.
(2) Altium
Again, it has momentum in business circles. And no interest in a linux port I'm sure. Some patchy WINE history, but bugs are (even more) likely.

Microcontroller work is the simplest of all to move between operating systems.

[nctnico]

Altium might be problematic. I have a seperate Windows 7 PC for that purpose but it gets powered on once or twice per year when I need to look at a design made in Altium for a particular customer. Orcad works fine in a Windows 7 Virtualbox VM and the PCB layout package of Orcad runs on Linux natively. I never had any success running software using Wine so I gave up on that. You might be able to run Altium in a VM but this will likely require using VMware as this has much better support of accellerated / 3D graphics.

I my world MS Office got replaced by Google docs a long time ago. None of my customers is using MS Office.

[SiliconWizard]

Yes Altium will be a problem. You may go the VM route for it. Ditto for MS Office.

I now mostly use KiCad, but in some cases you still need to use Altium when you don't have a choice. If just for viewing, Altium has a free online viewer, so you don't need anything installed: https://www.altium365.com/viewer/
The only thing to check is if you deal with a client that refuses to have its designs even just uploaded to the online viewer for confidentiality reasons. Otherwise, don't bother with a Windows PC!

For technical work, MS Office is increasingly becoming a thing of the past. I use LaTeX when I can (third parties don't have to edit it) and I want nice-looking docs, otherwise I increasingly use things like markdown / asciidoc, which are also easy to share (your technical, and even non-technical partners will have no problem editing those, it's pretty straightforward).

[nigelwright7557]

I sell some Windows software and still get asked if it works under XP.
Some people refuse to move on.

[brucehoult]

I sell some Windows software and still get asked if it works under XP.
Some people refuse to move on.

I have a VM with Server 2003 (with an ancient corporate license key) for when I absolutely have to use Windows to run some stupid software. Which is extremely rare. I went from VAX/VMS / AOSVS to Mac to Linux to OS X and ... well ... whichever of Linux or OSX best suits whatever hardware I want to use. I've had a few Hackintoshed x86 machines, and have Linux on old i7 Mac Minis. Never had a need for DOS or Windows except maybe for a couple of minutes to update microcode or BIOS or something on a Linux machine.

I did actually buy an i9-13900HX laptop a year ago and decided to give the Windows 11 that came on it a chance, thinking WSL might do the job. But it was just too frustrating. By default WSL only got 16 GB from the 32 GB RAM in the machine and that just wasn't enough. I was able to adjust it to a 22/10 split. Any more and Windows became glitchy and laggy. You can't access USB ports from WSL to do that typical microcontroller stuff. And Windows doesn't honour taskset in WSL, which I use a lot for task partitioning and benchmarking purposes. So I wiped the SSD clean and put on Ubuntu and haven't looked back. Everything works perfectly. Zero problems with WIFI or sleep/wake. The worst is that Windows could manage 6 hours of light use on battery power while Linux only manages 5 ... but I basically never need to be on battery for more than 2-3 hours at a time so really don't care.

[Rafiki]

My TLA 704 uses even older version of Windoze. It never complained about ;-)

[hans]

Altium might be problematic. I have a seperate Windows 7 PC for that purpose but it gets powered on once or twice per year when I need to look at a design made in Altium for a particular customer. Orcad works fine in a Windows 7 Virtualbox VM and the PCB layout package of Orcad runs on Linux natively. I never had any success running software using Wine so I gave up on that. You might be able to run Altium in a VM but this will likely require using VMware as this has much better support of accellerated / 3D graphics.

I my world MS Office got replaced by Google docs a long time ago. None of my customers is using MS Office.

I ran Altium for a while in VirtualBox. You do need Windows 10 as it has software emulation for DirectX that Altium needs (especially since versions from 6-8 yrs ago they were still using a very rare version of DirectX9 iirc). You also need quite a powerful machine. I gave it 12 cores from my Ryzen 9 3900X, but it seemed to be also okay on my 6 core 5600G server.
PCB layouting on moderate boards (100x100mm 4 layer with 200-pin QFPs, small BGAs etc.) was okay, 3D view was a bit choppy with antialiasing turned on.

But I moved to KiCad. Recent v9 now has a better padstack editor as well. I'm just waiting for better in mass edit and select/filter options (like you could write SQL stuff in Altium), and apart from a few quality of life features, I really don't see the need for Altium anymore. Not for the typical MCU grade kind of boards.. 2 to 6 layers, a few QFPs/QFNs, maybe some RF, USB2.0 and Ethernet traces.. stuff like that. Some people will design 400-pin FPGA or CPU boards with them too.
KiCad already has features that saved me time versius Altium. For example, the other day I had to import a 80-pin pinout from a module board connector. I copy pasted the pinout to a spreadsheet, translated the pin types from the datasheet, and then ran "kipart" to generate a KiCad symbol. I imported it, grouped the pins by function, and I was done with this fairly tedious symbol in a few minutes. Not sure if Altium can now do this too, but back when I used it (AD16 as latest?) it was still not available.
Another advantage of KiCad: I switch between Arch Linux and MacOS (yes quite the contrast) several times per week (Ryzen desktop, old MBP for hackerspace) and works just fine.

If Altium is really necessary, perhaps another option is to have a spare laptop, NUC etc... throw it in your server closet (every geek has their own NAS/server running right?) with Windows RDP set up. I ran OpenVPN on my router which could do around 100Mbit of traffic, and that was fine for Altium. We're not M-CAD engineers that are moving 3D renders around all day. If 2D rendering is smooth and 3D views loads with a few fps for sanity checks, then I call it good enough.

[SteveThackery]

I sell some Windows software and still get asked if it works under XP.
Some people refuse to move on.

It's a reasonable stance if "moving on" means "making it worse".  Change is good if it brings about an improvement, but it doesn't always do so.

Personally my line in the sand is W7 rather than XP, because I consider W7 to have the best ever iteration of the WIMP* interface, which I prefer and find the most productive.

Every version of Windows after W7 has a clunky kludge of touch UI and keyboard/mouse UI bodged together to try to make Windows mobile-friendly. They backed away from it slightly in W10, but the W10 and W11 design languages are still intended to work for both mobile/touch use AND mouse/keyboard-oriented users. For the latter it fails: it is substantially worse than W7.

Despite that I use W11 all the time now for compatibility with several of my apps, but if it weren't for that I'd still be using the best ever version of Windows for WIMP users: W7.

So, those "people who refuse to move on" are behaving rationally if moving on means making things worse (the touch UI) and they don't need the compatibility benefits W11 brings.

*WIMP = windows, icons, menus, pointer