Steam has now officially stopped supporting Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.::95.57 percent of surveyed Steam users are already on Windows 10 and 11, with nearly 2 percent of the remainder on Linux and 1.5 percent on Mac — so we may be talking about fewer than 1 percent of users on these older Windows builds. Older versions of MacOS will also lose support on February 15th, just a month and a half from now. Correction: It’s macOS 10.13 and 10.14 that are losing support. Not macOS period.
This is the sole reason my gaming rig is now running on Ubuntu. I have never had Linux on my personal computer before but since I was forced to update the OS anyway, I thought might aswell give Linux a shot.
Didn’t stop me from gaming on 7 either. I was only gaming on my windows partition so I didn’t worry too much about vulns. Nothing in 8-11 interests me so I thought I’d try all my gaming in Linux and have been blown away by how good it is. I ran 7 up until last April and the cracks had finally started to show.
The cracks were probably because you were part of a botnet for using an insecure OS for years lol
Congrats on joining Linux squad!
Linux gaming got waaaaay better than in before times. Also, the system itself is a miracle for someone coming from Windows. I remember that feeling. It’s correct :)
Out of curiosity (I no longer run win 7 at all so can’t check), does this mean steam will give an error if you try to run it on win 7 and will refuse to run? Or is this just valve saying they are no longer committed to releasing any updates for win 7? Or a combination of the two where they aren’t deliberately making it incompatible, but they also aren’t deliberately making it compatible so some patch is expected to break it entirely, maybe even today?
Steam is basically a DRM system which means you won’t be able to run any of your existing games on Windows 7/8. It will break all your steam games either immediately or within days.
No big. Just run everything in compatibility mode and pick Windows 10 or 11.
/s
Pro tip, set it to Windows 12 so you don’t have to worry for another decade or more
Please, that’s rookie terms.
Set it to 98, you won’t have to worry about it again for like, a century.
Get this set it to 2000, not even your great grand kids will have to worry about it.
I’m on Linux :)
How’s the experience, overall? I love the Steam Deck OS UI, so I’m thinking of building an AMD machine to run Chimera OS. I’ve heard nothing but problems when it comes to Windows 11.
I don’t intend on playing competitive shooters, so idc about kernel anticheat keeping me out of Call of Duty or whatever.
I play exclusively on Linux. Almost every game I tried worked flawlessly. The very few that didn’t, crashed on startup or a few minutes after. If you don’t play AAA online games with anticheat then you should be good. As a rule of thumb, if it works on the Deck then it will work on any Linux distro.
Hell yeah! I’ve only experienced a few crashes on SD, and so far only on 2 emulated games that I’m okay with just not playing. I love that Valve started really investing in Linux support to make it possible for idiots like me to have somewhere to turn when Microsoft phones it in.
If you are using steam, there’s protondb, where you can check how well game runs on linux
I appreciate the link, but I was more asking about the general experience than about game compatibility. I have a Steam Deck and am enjoying the game functionality, and I haven’t hit too many snags in general PC usage on it yet in desktop mode (but I’ve barely used it for that). I’m really just asking around as a medium level Windows user about fully replacing my Windows laptop with a Chimera build to see what concessions I’ll need to accept to have realistic expectations. I’m optimistic that frustrations will be mostly at the “dang it, oh well” level which I could either live with or find a layman level solution to kinda fix. So far, the only real concern I’ve found with my plan to build a modern Chimera steam machine is that the parts I want will cost me like $1500, and that’s pretty hard to justify when I already have a Steam Deck, PS5, and a 2015 Windows 10 laptop. It’s another expensive device that kinda just does what my current shit can already do, just all in one rig. If my laptop or PS5 died, I’d have a lot more reason to go for it.
I’m a fairly casual gamer these days, but nonetheless it’s been a very long time since I encountered a game on Steam that wouldn’t run at least tolerably well under Proton, with most of them running flawlessly. As long as you check the DB before buying, you’re fine. As you say, it’s only really the anticheat software which causes major road blocks most of the time.
Performance is amazingly better on Linux via Proton than it is on Windows quite a lot of the time. It’s an incredible achievement.
For non Steam games, Lutris also provides as easy, one-click experience for getting many games working, and although I don’t have a lot of personal experience with it (Steam covers most of my needs) when I have used it it’s been a pleasure, and it has a good reputation.
I use bog standard un-tweaked Ubuntu. One would assume that the performance on the specialist gaming distros may be even better still.
Especially if you’re not gonna play stuff that the anticheat locks you out from, the experience is great. As other commenters have said, ProtonDB.com has resources for how well games on steam run under Proton / On Linux.
Although, I would recommend Nobara Linux over Chimera OS due to a lack of experience with Proton and other gaming-related tools (as in, Chimera developers’ lack of experience). Nobara Linux comes from the same developer as Proton-GE (GloriousEggroll). Proton is the tool that Valve developed to run Windows games pretty much seemlessly, and Proton-GE adds extra features and patches on-top of it that can help support more games or get the slightest extra bit of performance out of Proton. Nobara Linux extends this concept to the entire OS, with a stable Fedora base that gets a major update every ~6 months.
Nobara also consitently outperforms other Linux Distributions and even Windows regularly.
(This doesn’t mean that you don’t get updates for 6 months, just that major releases, e.g from 39 to 40 happen every ~6 months)
Ooh, I’ll look into that! I was interested in Chimera because of some articles and videos I’ve seen which were praising its similarities to Steam OS. I liked booting up into Steam directly via the controller like it’s just another console, but having the freedom to use it as a PC. And it seemed popular enough that if I hit a snag I could probably find somebody out there who had the same issue and already found and posted a fix. Plus continuing support, which is something I learned is not the case for HoloISO. I guess I was looking for the closest thing to Steam OS which is Arch based, so I thought I had to run an Arch Linux to have a good console-like UI/UX.
Don’t stretch the truth and give them an unrealistic idea.
There are games that don’t work, Some due to draconian and oppressive DRM or invasive anti-cheat. Some don’t work just because.
Generally, the ones that work dont just because will eventually become playable. I’ve had a few games I had to back burner for a while, but a few months later became perfectly playable with proton updates and such.
But on the flipside I have Day 1’d quite a few games, some perfectly (Mostly games with older engines like Starfield), some not so perfectly (Like Cyberpunk 2077), but they were all very playable with patience and understanding.
@MrVilliam I suggest you hit protondb.com and check the games you commonly play. If they are gold or higher you should be good.
As for Distro, I’d personally recomend Nobara for gaming on Linux. Its a great experience, smooth, and has pretty much everything you need packaged in the install already, so you don’t have to deal with any tedious bullshit like having to compile something if its not packaged for your distro.
I dont mean to repeat myself, but patience and understanding is going to be key in successfully getting it going. You’re gonna be learning a completely new OS, and new procedures, from scratch. There will be moments where it may be frustrating trying to figure things out, but you don’t have to be a Tech Savant to get through it, and once you get your head wrapped around it… installing and playing will pretty much be as seamless as you’re used to on windows. Its not perfect by any means, regardless of what anyone says, but its pretty god damn good where its at now, and is rapidly getting better.
Translating into Linux terms, Steam has dropped support for:
- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolian
That is up to you of course. Luckily I left Microsoft Windows 12 years ago. No more.
Lmao i only knew they could stop supporting windows 7, people uae more windows 7 than windows 8
The un-fucking of Windows 8 release
It actually was a pretty useable OS most of the time
I used 8.1 all the way until around 2019, when I finally relented and switched to 10 (on 11 now). Take Windows 7 and 10, and do a “greatest hits” edition, and you have 8.1. It was basically 7 with some features that went into 10 mixed in. A fine OS for daily driving.
I would have used it for longer; only upgraded because you’d run into random little issues and bugs with various programs cause no one used it.
Windows 8.1 was a major update that undid a lot of UI updates that people didn’t like after 7
I didn’t conceptually hate the UI there was just so much room for improvement in implementation, if I recall correctly. I was only using a Windows machine for a short time during that era though.
