Do people still use Windows 7 for microcontroller work?

[NorthGuy]

Do people still use Windows 7 for microcontroller work? Whether development or production ...

[Sacodepatatas]

I do, everything seems to work fine: mplab, the cubeide/cubeprogrammer/stflash), Arduino (I use it solely because of the firmware of my old 3D printer), MounRiver, Octave, Kitcad, LTSpice (the one with extended libraries), but I can't upgrade to Windows 10 because my system is so much messed up so the upgrader refuses to perform any changes once 10h has passed from attempting.

I had some troubles installing an old version of MSYS2 in order to have a working "make" but finally I managed to do it and now I use the ARM toolchain + PYOCD with converted St-link clone into a CMSIS DAP, for working with the PUYA PY32F00-Template.

[woofy]

My last win7 machine died many years ago so as much as I liked it, I just let win7 go.
I use win10 when I have to, otherwise I live in Linux (mint).

[JPortici]

When windows 10 goes out of support i'll push to move my machine to debian (which i already use at home, though i rarely if ever do any work there)
I'll keep a windows 11 VM, locally or on the server, just to deploy the software and for whatever won't work under wine

[BadeBhaiya]

Most embedded devs (at least in my part of the world) use windows 7 or 10 (or 11, more recently), with only vendor IDEs

Me? I use Arch Linux BTW

[mikeselectricstuff]

I find Win7 mostly OK - the only thing I've seen break is support for PICkit 5/ICD5 in recent versoins of MPLABX

[asmi]

I use Win10 and Linux.

[langwadt]

I use Win10 and Linux.

ditto, though much of the time in win10 is in WSL or remoting to a linux box

[PartialDischarge]

the only thing I've seen break is support for PICkit 5/ICD5 in recent versoins of MPLABX

I couldn't make it work both in W7 and Macos, so I had to use W11 for this one

[IDEngineer]

So far I've been able to continue using Win7: Workstation, primary laptop, secondary laptop, everywhere. In fact, I just spun up a new-to-me X270 to replace the X260 that was stolen in November. The compatibility issues have been manageable but the day is coming.

[luiHS]

I was using Windows XP for a little over 10 years until my computer broke and I was forced to upgrade to Windows 7, which I think I've been using for another 10 years now, and I'll continue to do so until my computer breaks again and the new motherboards no longer support W7.

It annoys me because I can't update MCUXpresso or Chrome anymore, but I'm fine with the latest version of MCUXpresso that's compatible with W7.

I have another SSD with W10 but I don't use it, I'm too lazy to upgrade because I'd have to reinstall all the software I use, with the risk of compatibility issues. Curiously, this is the first time I've bought a Windows in my life. As the saying goes, if something works, don't touch it, my W7 works very well, I know where everything is and I have all the software I use installed.

[peter-h]

I use win7-64 everywhere. It works fine and with the Simplix process you can update it to nearly win10/11 level.

Very few programs actually need win10+. MS VC++ 2022 is one of these so if I have to rebuild someone's VC++ project I have a win10 machine for that.

STM Cube IDE says win10+ but actually runs fine on win7-64.

WinXP also works perfectly (and remains widely used for production test etc) but can't be used for any broad application due to lack of web browsers supporting https, and increasingly lack of drivers for e.g. motherboards.

[SteveThackery]

I love W7 - I think it is the pinnacle of Windows development. Forcing a touch-oriented UI onto mouse/keyboard users - as in Windows 8 onwards - was a really bad decision, in my opinion.

However, I use a mix of 10 and 11 on my machines for compatibility with modern apps. I do, though, have a W7 virtual machine.

[Rafiki]

Yes,

[microwhat]

I love W7 - I think it is the pinnacle of Windows development.

Windows 7 is the last windows OS that gets out of your way and lets you do what you want with your computer.

[gamalot]

I use Windows 11, sometimes WSL2.

[IDEngineer]

I love W7 - I think it is the pinnacle of Windows development.

100% agreed.

Windows 7 is the last windows OS that gets out of your way and lets you do what you want with your computer.

THIS. So much exactly this. I want to focus on debugging my project. Not debugging Microsoft's latest unwelcome, unrequested "we know better than you" changes to my work environment. I might be willing to be an unpaid beta tester, but I want to choose when and on what equipment.

[nctnico]

I love W7 - I think it is the pinnacle of Windows development.

Windows 7 is the last windows OS that gets out of your way and lets you do what you want with your computer.

Windows 7 was already on the decline. No Hyperterminal and the file browser behaves funky (hiding files and never scrolling to where you need to be at). I strongly prefer to use Windows XP if I have to use Windows. Fortunately I switched to Linux a long time ago.

[Gyro]

Linux (Mint) + XP and W7 VMs here. The best of all worlds I think.


P.S. I also keep an old Thinkpad, running XP, with a parallel port to support my Ailent Logicwave LA and Dataman programmer - although it still capable of acting as a host for a bunch of other USB tools, old 16bit Picoscope etc.

[Siwastaja]

Windows 7 was already on the decline. No Hyperterminal and the file browser behaves funky (hiding files and never scrolling to where you need to be at). I strongly prefer to use Windows XP if I have to use Windows. Fortunately I switched to Linux a long time ago.

You are completely right. I also had massive problems with things as mundane as printer driver or USB memory stick support. Also some software from 1990's which still ran perfectly fine on... 95, 98, 2000, and XP, started to fail on Windows 7.

I never understood the Windows 7 cult. It meant a significant increase in problems, and start of the collapse of Microsoft's semi-decent "the OS itself can be as shitty as it is, but at very least don't break old userland software, keep 'em running" approach. And that's literally the only strong point of Windows - the fact it can run software that no other OSes run because of lack of porting. When they started shooting down compatibility of old software, that was the end of it.

All that being said, trying to use Windows for software development feels like pain. It's always just about coping; somehow managing to get the job done nevertheless. Stuff like Cygwin helps to manage, but really, yuck. Luckily, Windows-only workflows are exceedingly rare.

[Kleinstein]

It takes quite some time to get used to a new OS. Another issue with Windows is that the constant updates can be a real pain - slowing things down during download and occasional changes that break things or just hide them somewhere else. I can totally understand not wanting to upgrade to something significan different. Windows 8 was also rather confusing with more tile type apps, more like a phone.

I still use 2 older computers, one with Win8.2 and one still with Win98 (mainly for µC use, as that one still has old style RS232 and parallel port).

[NorthGuy]

I use Windows 7 on my main PC. It is sirca 2011. It does lack some features, such as ability to mount an ISO image. Otherwise, it works perfectly.

I have half-a-dozen of Windows 10/11 PCs for testing purposes, but only one of them is connected to the Internet. This one constantly updates, messes settings, shows ads. If I could control it, I would cut the forced updates, uninstall unwanted software (which is 95% of what's installed). Then it probably would be Ok for me. But I can't. So it remains to be a Microsoft toy bought on my money.

[thm_w]

I have another SSD with W10 but I don't use it, I'm too lazy to upgrade because I'd have to reinstall all the software I use, with the risk of compatibility issues. Curiously, this is the first time I've bought a Windows in my life. As the saying goes, if something works, don't touch it, my W7 works very well, I know where everything is and I have all the software I use installed.

Backup then upgrade.
Or copy appdata/programs over to your win10 install. Then maybe load some drivers.

If I could control it, I would cut the forced updates, uninstall unwanted software (which is 95% of what's installed). Then it probably would be Ok for me. But I can't. So it remains to be a Microsoft toy bought on my money.

You can either find the tools to modify pro/enterprise editions or get the LTSC edition.
Don't use Home edition, obviously, though that still may be modifyable somewhat.

[peter-h]

Win 7 can mount an ISO image. One can mount those, and one can mount Trueimage backups (using TI itself).

Nothing is for ever but I expect to be running win 7 10 years from now. There are simply bigger fish to fry in life than setting up yet another PC whose UI has been changed in so many ways. The name of the game is productivity...

MS still updates win 7 (64) for paying corporate customers and the updates can be downloaded for free using the Simplix process.

[langwadt]

Nothing is for ever but I expect to be running win 7 10 years from now. There are simply bigger fish to fry in life than setting up yet another PC whose UI has been changed in so many ways. The name of the game is productivity...

so you expect to run the same HW 10 years from now?

[peter-h]

When PCs reached 3.5GHz (quad core i7) they could go only sideways, which works only for apps which can run multiple threads concurrently and do something useful with it.

So, yes

For high end CAD/EDA, it is different, potentially.

What may drive a move to win10+ is indeed motherboard availability, but right now I can buy 10-20 year old MBs on Ebay, which I do very occassionally to fix some old test rig when I want zero hassle. I doubt any MBs are made now which support XP.

Also I run a pile of XP VMWARE VMs which work perfectly for the old apps like Protel PCB 2.8 (yes ex 1995 and still great!) and Corel Draw 11.

[jwet]

I have a few machines around.  For anything that touches the web, only 10 and transitioning to 11.

I have a notebook that boosts win7 and I run a couple of old apps on it at times.  It also has Virtual Box that let's me run a copy of XP.  I have two or three old technical apps that never got past XP.  Protel 99, Xeltek Eprom S/W and tool chain that use Autocad LT that feeds into a CAM program for simple CNC.  Until recently, I had a machine setup to boot XP natively because I had a parallel PCI card for 488 and some old NI Labview, but that's machine died and I haven't yet replaced it.  I don't do much 488 and I guess I'll buy a USB dongle if I need to.

Over the years, I've always had machines running 1 or 2 generation old Windows install- but its a huge PIA.

[thm_w]

I have a notebook that boosts win7 and I run a couple of old apps on it at times.  It also has Virtual Box that let's me run a copy of XP.  I have two or three old technical apps that never got past XP.  Protel 99, Xeltek Eprom S/W and tool chain that use Autocad LT that feeds into a CAM program for simple CNC.  Until recently, I had a machine setup to boot XP natively because I had a parallel PCI card for 488 and some old NI Labview, but that's machine died and I haven't yet replaced it.  I don't do much 488 and I guess I'll buy a USB dongle if I need to.

Reported here that Protel 99 works fine on windows 10: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/running-protel-99se-on-windows-10-virtual-machine/

But unless you use it regularly probably best just staying in the VM.

[jwet]

I'll have to try Protel on Win 10- thanks, that's cool.  I have almost gotten proficient at KiCad but miss Protel 99- it really worked well for me.  I have an old LPKF PCB grinder and recently learned that it's two apps will run in Win10 with a modified install process to avoid 16 bit installers.

I also saw somewhere that there is a registry poke of some kind to let Xeltek's eprom programmer run on Win10.  I don't know if it was on this blog or elsewhere.

EDIT- wow, thm_w, Microsoft is a real trigger for some.  Isn't there some kind of medicine for that kind of anxiety these days.  I'm going to try to make the investment to move forward with KiCad but I won't be deleting those old install disks and serial number for 99SE.

[peter-h]

Actually Protel PCB 2.8 (1995) does everything needed for me.

The one thing which is a hassle with it is that DRC often fails on broken ground planes. It just gets the connectivity wrong and thinks there is not when actually there is. Not sure Protel PCB 99 fixed that.

[jwet]

Protel 99SE is basically bug free and crash free for me.  The inertia with cad apps is that I have 100 designs on the old software and I have this debugged data flow from artwork to a package I can send to a board house without any surprise.  I'm not sure exactly why its so important to move forward.

[nctnico]

Define 'moving forward'... new isn't always better and sometimes a step backward. Unfortunately many are obsessed by the latest & greatest tempted by clever marketing and FUD.

[IDEngineer]

Agreed. Long ago I tired of learning "the latest revision" of things, only to find 1) they didn't deliver any improvement in my workflow to justify the time invested to (re)learn them, and 2) they were just as quickly replaced with the *next* revision, making the last one completely unnecessary!

[peter-h]

Yes; I have found that XP works perfectly for all stuff not needing a web browser. If running simple apps it can easily have an uptime of a year or more; I run two "servers" on XP (they deliver specialised data files to another machine) and they run basically for ever (well, until the SSD gets trashed by XP; various previous threads on that one which is why I have just rebuilt a native-XP SSD machine as a VMWARE XP VM under win7-64). XP finished for normal desktop use due to this browser issue (which incidentally also rapidly killed off the Symbian OS on Nokia phones, even the great ones like the 808 with that superb camera) plus the inability to use more than 3.5GB of RAM.

My Protel PCB 2.8 and Orcad/386 do the whole workflow that I need. Of course there are better CAD apps but mostly they are buggered by licensing. I might give Protel 99 another try... and see if it has fixed the DRC.

Win7-64 then picks up and thus far is 100% fine, except where the app specifically won't install; MS VC++ 2022 is one recent case.

One saves a lot of time by not fighting with the latest stuff.

[jwet]

The Access database model in Protel 99 is unfortunate and is the only truly bad feature for me.  I side step it when I create a new project- it gives you the option to just use a file hierarchy.  I can then do sensible things with the data without worrying about breaking the database.

I've used DRC pretty extensively and it seems solid to me.  If you post a situation that will trigger your bug, I can run it and see if its still there.  I run 99SE. There are two post release enhancements that I use, one is a hole size editor that I use that let's you globally edit hole sizes on a project and the other  is a service pack- I believe its a stability fix.  You can find them online.

This "newer is better" is endemic in software generally but CAD software especially.  I don't use any feature that wasn't standard in Office 95 or Autocad LT97.  All the extras that are added are just bloat that make it harder for me to find the core tools.   Its only for web security and the hassle of maintaining old OS platforms that have moved me off these old platforms.  I was happy to upgrade from DOS Orcad (3?) and Tango PCB in the late 80's but since I haven't found much utility in upgrades.  The old model of buy once and use forever doesn't work for software companies I guess- I wonder how it worked in the past?  I've never called a S/W company support line though I have browsed their user community sites- this seems free or near free and I'd pay for access if this made things work for them.  Shelling out a few hundred a month just doesn't work, my work is too inconsistent (by design).  Shelling out a few thousand in a lump can work, I have occasional windfalls, but this model is fading.  The old Eagle model of a mostly workable free/cheap tier and then graduated tiers was pretty good and I tried.  Eagle was just an illogical mess for me- CAD software involves a lot of little operations.  The UI needs to be very clean with symmetrical operations and shortcuts.  I could never get to this level in Eagle and I would forget it between boards.  I don't understand how an open source model like KiCad can survive if a for profit model like Protel struggles.  I do donate to KiCad gladly and am amazed by how far it has come, the only problem with its complete adoption for me is to adjust my tool flow, learn all the pitfalls and get some experience- I've done maybe 6 boards with it.  Dave Jones has put together good content on this and has worked for Altium in the past.  He has given them advice on how to go to market and low end versions, etc.  I don't know why these companies can't just make their offerings match up with the needs of their customer base.  It seems that they identify their customers as either a small company that has one or two seats and can pay a large annual fee or a large company with 20 seats where all this is in the noise.  There is a huge segment of this business like my own where I'm doing a dozen boards a year, writing software, supporting my customers etc.  Its just out of whack.

[peter-h]

I think the old days (1980s etc) it worked because PCB CAD was moving people from drafting film + tape to CAD, and same for circuit drawing. So there was mass adoption and a lot of $$$ was being made, even at $500 per user.

After everybody had moved, say c. 1995, the money stream dried out and companies had to find other ways to make money. So we got a load of crappy buggy updates, each one fixing 10 bugs and introducing 11 new bugs.

Altium's replacement for Protel does way more but they are trying to get 20k from you (last time they phoned me, maybe 10 years ago) whereas Protel 2.8 was about 1.5k. The guy came down to under 10k during the phone call but I still didn't go for it

The business will stabilise at some much lower level than the good old days and at very high price points, and cheap software will dominate the lower end.

Back to Windows, all the time we hear the corporate BS about "security" (when actually most attack vectors are via the browser or email client route, not via somebody hacking your PC from outside and doing super clever tricks to penetrate NAT) most people will just keep upgrading.

I will try out 99SE shortly Thanks massively for the tip about avoiding the stupid crazy client-server model!

[SiliconWizard]

I remember Protel DXP (2004? 2005?), which was pretty good at the time and with significant improvements over 99SE. It also has a better chance of working on more recent Windows.

[jwet]

You make a good point about going from drafting boards to CAD.  You also mention lower end solutions, there is a lower end PCB CAD tier, you're right.  I have looked at these offerings and ran their trials, etc.  There are inevitably a couple of boneheaded features that are hard to get around that keep me from adopting them.  The other issue is that they often become orphanware when their developers realize that their business model is not sustainable in 5 years when I have a lot of time invested.

I can imagine that there are many thousands of man hours in KiCad- at $300K/yr cost of a developer and 20 man years, this a 6 million dollar investment up front and sustaining cost of 1/4 of this.  In order to sell the software for say $2000 initially and $500 per year which I would see as "reasonable" for my operation, it would take something like 3000 users initially and something similar sustaining.  This is break even money.  When they double and triple it to make 60% margins, it breaks- this is where we are.

Open source, volunteer development has limits too.  I'm a Wikipedia fan/contributor but that model is having sustainability issues now.  The enthusiastic college students and hackers that got it off the ground, are now married with 2 kids and are spending their Saturdays at Soccer games rather than pulling Pizza fueled all niters in the basement of their Computer center at their university.

I'll keep searching.  I've worked for some big companies and coughing up big money for software is always hard- even the $10K for Altium.  The problem was that we had hundreds of labs and locations and they all wanted a copy that they would occasionally use.  Some software allowed floating licensing but purchasing would inevitably buy just enough licenses that you'd be guaranteed to be locked out in crunch periods = always.   This tier of software is peanuts compared to Synopsis, etc.  We ran multiple shifts for layout to minimize those licenses.

It will be interesting to see where it settles.

[jwet]

I remember Protel DXP (2004? 2005?), which was pretty good at the time and with significant improvements over 99SE. It also has a better chance of working on more recent Windows.

DXP was a forgettable experiment- pretty unstable/failure to launch and mature.

[peter-h]

Protel SE99 implements split planes very differently to previous versions. Just spent an hour on it and not ready to move to it yet Might do some new design with it, but for sure it doesn't just import older files.

[peter-h]

One fun thing today:

A winXP machine was no longer able to access a Synology NAS drive. Must have happened recently, with a NAS software update. Did some googling and two things changed: XP needs SMB1 plus WS discovery. Now, the internet is full of stuff like you will get hacked immediately but this drive is on an internal LAN, the main router has no open ports, so WTF...

Win7 has no networking issues. It all just works, same as win10+.

[nigelwright7557]

I sell software and quite often get asked if it works on XP.
So many people are still on XP.

I use Win11 for MPLAB X, PCB Design, Microsoft Visual Studio etc.
I use integrated graphics which works fine for my needs.

[peter-h]

They will struggle with using the internet. Not sure if there are any browsers now supporting the current https certificates. AFAIK if you have say Chrome installed on XP from long ago, it will still work, but you will keep getting certificate errors. I have an old Android tablet on which the current Dolphin browser still installs and works but with lots of certificate warnings.

[Gyro]

The safest thing to do with an XP machine is to isolate it completely from the web / local network and transfer files to and from a later windows/linux computer using a USB memory stick. Any earlier than XP, you get tangled up with needing to find drivers but XP will install any random stick. No different really from the way most people transfer waveform captures from scopes.

[peter-h]

The safest thing to do with an XP machine is to isolate it completely from the web

Why? What is the precise attack surface, if on a LAN and behind a NAT router?

I heard a story a few times that windows 2000 goes online and gets infected very quickly all by itself, but a) I've never seen that myself (having done a number of win2k installs as "machine admin" partitions on machines running something else) and b) it sounds too weird.

[nctnico]

The safest thing to do with an XP machine is to isolate it completely from the web

Why? What is the precise attack surface, if on a LAN and behind a NAT router?

I heard a story a few times that windows 2000 goes online and gets infected very quickly all by itself, but a) I've never seen that myself (having done a number of win2k installs as "machine admin" partitions on machines running something else) and b) it sounds too weird.

Only if you connect it to internet directly. There is no problem with a firewall (NAT router) in between. Back in the old days, dial up internet or DSL would connect your PC directly to internet and a newly installed Windows would get infected sooner than you could download & install anti-virus software or updates.  I have witnessed this myself.

[peter-h]

OK; sure. I remember that. It was some 72 byte packet which was sent out everywhere and which exploited some Win95-2000 back door.

Completely irrelevant to anything nowadays, but FUD lives on

[NorthGuy]

100 people have voted. And the results are not what I would expect. I thought that most people would have switched to modern Windows by now, but the number of those who switched is completely miserable.

[SiliconWizard]

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.

[NorthGuy]

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.

[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