Too bad about no WIN 7

[SamSteele]

Too bad about Affinity no longer operating in WIN 7 OS. Thousands of people (if not millions) still use it because it works! WIN 10 is a dog. The "improvements" made it worse. No doubt 11 will be worse still. And also too bad that AFF is letting MS lead them around on a chain. Aff could drop like a stone, like Corel did. 

Why do software people keep improving things until they are unusable? Ego, I suppose.
What if winemakers did that?

[Catshill]

It’s a security risk to be running W7

“security updates and technical support for Windows 7 ended on January 14, 2020.”

[Komatös]

Why do software developers improve their programmes? Because users expect it. Why should developers always drag along old burdens?

The share of Windows 7 may still be high, but the share of users who use Windows 7 and the Affinity programmes is negligible.

And Windows 7 is even more of a blabbermouth than Windows 10 or 11.

Edited November 12, 2022 by Komatös
clarification

[FatalFetale]

10 hours ago, SamSteele said:

Why do software people keep improving things until they are unusable?

Sometimes things just cannot be compatible because of prerequisites. Sometimes the old tech isn't capable of running those prereqs at all.

I hope that's the case here, because I'm personally very tired of needless version checking. Especially the ones that just let you install on something on a Windows 10 machine, copy over the installation and possibly mess with the registry to make the software happy, and have the program be completely operatable under a previous version of Windows. The MSIX appmanifest reads a prerequisite for Microsoft.VCLibs.140.00, which seems to be Windows 10 minimum sadly.

5 hours ago, Catshill said:

It’s a security risk to be running W7

“security updates and technical support for Windows 7 ended on January 14, 2020.”

Since it needs to be said at some point; We get it! This doesn't contribute anything to any discussion about backwards compatibility. Let users take whatever security risk they want, those few who stick around have already been bombarded with "sEcUriTy rISk" and likely aren't technologically illiterate since upgrading is the quickest and easiest solution for the masses. Either way; user choice. Just let me attempt to install your software, especially when it doesn't have any damn prerequisites.

The best case you have preventing older versions of Windows from installing is less distractions on forums and bug reports, where you can isolate issues quicker. Even then, there's gonna be a small flood of Windows 7 users asking why the hell the software suddenly stopped working out of nowhere, with an update or something. Since support is going to shout "UPGRADE" all day anyway, why not just let the software run its course and redirect users to upgrade when it becomes incompatible? Or you know, tell them to install older versions of the software, if you let them anyway. Looking at you, Adobe.