I used to use Win7, but I did crash ALL THE TIME.
Thankfully I upgraded to Win11.
Phew!
Anyways this is not a good day for the people using Win7 to Win8.1
Might be a stupid question, but why not postpone this and include windows 10, it’s support by Microsoft is planned to drop 2025 anyway.
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never tried the release you mentioned ,it seems to remove the updating and ads issue, not sure about the ‘what runs in the background’ stuff but its designed for companies and important services which shouldn’t be disturbed (implying microsoft knows how annoying that stuff is in the standard versions)
issue with this: windows 7 and 8.1 dont need special optimization. the real thing holding the engine back is GL ES 2.0 support. windows 8.1 is only missing a few things API wise that windows 10 has and they don’t matter for games (actually ive compiled windows 10 programs to run on vista with just a few flags added)
unless they are adding hardware blacklists you can run a vista era device on roblox still (hell I have before)
**not some 7 era laptops and AIOs though, the HD 3000 driver is broken under 10.
because thats delusional. windows 10 and 11 are identical under the hood minus a few internal memory management things that developers dont even see
edit: forgot to add that windows 10 still has higher market share than windows 11
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I (and many others) predict many users are going to take their sweet time and use 10 even farther past its EoL than 7. This is mostly because of 11’s controversial policies, requirements, and AI junk.
Unless you mean to push this back, like, ten years. At that point 7 will be the new XP, and will be almost entirely unusable no matter what online stuff you want to do with it.
I bet it’s already been getting harder and harder to write working, efficient, cross-compatible code that includes all the modern features that studio includes while running properly under the past 4 major Windows versions. Imagine trying to get UE4 running under Windows XP. That is why this is happening now. It costs extra money to make sure everything works with older OSes, and that likely won’t be a problem for quite a while with Windows 10, which will still have diehard users by 2026.
TL;DR: Too many 10 users in the near future, not enough 7 users. Software development is expensive.
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I have an older laptop with 8.1 that i don’t plan on upgrading (due to the fact I don’t know if windows 10 would be stable on it, plus on it I like windows 8) nor do I plan to get a new one as I got my PC and I cannotjustifybuying a new laptop when I don’t use it much, that said I don’t use it much anymore but if I were to go somewhere Id take it and probably do a bit of building
But my question after this even if we have it installed we no longer can open it and use it at all? I mean I understand with security concerns etc but what about people who cannot afford to upgrade etc, why can’t they just continue to use whatever version like other programs might have done.
Also I’ll add I plan to keep my PC on windows 10, Microsoft had made a statement when 10 came out that it would be always be supported… but no they had to go back on that… I don’t like aspects of windows 11, and it had issues with games or something.
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Absolutely not… I for one am not going to windows 11…
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Any particular Windows API library calls that we’ll need to look out for?
CC @RealLehione, @SethPaw:
Dropping ‘support’ for a version of Windows isn’t as bad as it seems.
I’m running an old insider version of Windows 11 22H2. Yes, I’m behind on my security updates. But I don’t care and neither should you.
If you really need Windows 11, some systems enthusiasts would point you to Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC. I can give more information on demand.
If you haven’t been hiding under a Windows 7 rock, Windows 10 Enterprise IOT 2021 comes with legit nothing bloated or adware that Mainline Windows has, and also you get pro and cool enterprise features too, while being fast and not bloated.
Also bro, just use ShutUp10++ if you don’t want the bloatware and other crap.
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I laughed when I saw the name, actually fits what we want quite well. 
There’s no reason to keep using Windows 7 or 8.1. It’s just more tedious and doesn’t offer any advantages. The only reason people still use it is either to make Microsoft mad or to hold onto false nostalgia. In my opinion let Windows 7 and 8.1 rest in peace.
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I get that 7 and 8.1 are EOL, but this is an IGNORANT solution, solely because there aren’t ANY reliable (atleast in the long-term) official Roblox builds for Linux.
I posted the following in Development Discussion threads regarding this topic. They’re still extremely relevant:
Remember that Windows 10 was supposed to be the “final” windows and now leaks show there’s going to be more after 11.
Why would I keep upgrading when the new OSes bring nothing but new, artificial issues to me?
Also, note that ROBLOX still supports Android 6.0 and Open GL ES 3.0, iOS 12 & the original iPad Air. I also recall they said in one of their blog posts that one of their goals are to make it run smoothly on 3 GB Android devices. These devices obviously would be outdated in some form since Android phone manufacturers usually drop update support two years after they released the phone.
How come Windows users are different in this scenario? What special APIs that the newer versions have that are so critical for ROBLOX to use as a game engine, that Android 6 and iOS 12 apparently have from several years ago?
if you put a bit of elbow grease into it you can really easily debloat your windows and just uninstall/remove unwanted things. Is it easy to do?,
Why do I need to spend hours descrewing an OS (I can’t even get a usable consistent UI without taking the path that Classic Theme fans take and outright begin bricking now-integral parts of the OS’s functionality!) that, in it’s previous releases, worked fine practically out of the box? Crippling win10+ components just to get a user-experience that’d be worse than running 7?
If Windows’ known telemetry hosts are blocked, it attempts phoning home through all kinds of random Azure hosts, that if blocked, just HAPPEN break half of the internet. The only thing that somewhat seems to work is to hard block all outgoing traffic to internet from Windows machines and run a proxy server in the LAN and configure it per application basis, hoping that they don’t invent something that detects this and automatically routes OS shitware traffic through it.
At that point, ROBLOX wouldn’t even work on that kind of setup anymore because it gives you an error chock full of nothing for you to figure out.
Is it really that worth it just for a program that hasn’t really changed at its core since it’s inception and is most likely only doing this artificially? Remember that ROBLOX is a public company and has some very interesting people investing in it.
, not always but I think its better than exposing yourself to security risks lol.
There is no such thing as “security risks” if you have Common Sense. This seems to have become some sort of evil boogeyman that tech-illiterate users are deathly afraid of; most likely because they have zero idea what it actually means as a random end-user compared to an enterprise or server host.
I am not going to run a half-baked, bloated1 system with terrible ergonomics, performance, and a demoralizing UI design just because some rookie Roblox engineers eventually want to shove some garbage (most likely a updated version of React that doesn’t support 7-8) into the client.
Steam did this same exact thing2 and it turned out to solely be because they wanted to replace everything with Google Chrome.
It’s painfully obvious that all of the competent programmers at most tech companies nowadays have either died, been fired in exchange for some random web developer from a thousand miles away, or simply just quit.
I don’t want to install several third party bloat programs so I can end up making a basic Windows 10 LTSC IOT Enterprise install “tolerable”. I’ve used 10 in VMs and used it on my primary machine for around 6 years until only two or so years ago.
The amount of times that 10 crashed or bricked itself to such a degree where I had to reinstall it was such a high number that I don’t EVER want to deal with that garbage again.
No matter how much you gut and modify Windows 10, it will always be 10. Skinning it to make it look like it’s predecessors does not mean it will have the performance, efficiency, and simplicity that Windows 7 and it’s predecessors has, either.
reject proprietary software and make the jump to the
I used Debian for a short amount of time before switching to 7. Although not as bad as 10, I spent more time tinkering and fixing problems than actually doing real work. Roblox support on Linux is hanging by a thread, reliant on the mercy of engineers to keep their special workarounds intact, at the expense of performance.
Not everyone has top notch hardware nor the means to upgrade to better hardware.
I am also 100% sure that not everyone is willing to become a consoomer and upgrade their hardware & update their Windows, at their expense just to play a game that’s been having performance and quality issues very recently solely because of incompetent people who aren’t willing to learn how to natively program and use APIs that have existed since NT 4.0.
*1 - It’s not just the userspace that’s bloated, the kernel itself has been turned into utter shit, a big example of these “features” would be the obscure “kernel latency” features that were added in an attempt to make systems more “stable”, but ended up making things a whole lot slower in the process.
When I use modern Windows, I find myself just fighting with the OS and trying to tinker to the same degree when I was on Linux, except all the tinkering is just to get basic access to things 7 and previous would just let you touch out of the box.
Windows 10 and 11 really don’t add that much, they could have just ported a lot of modern features to 7, changed the theme and called it a day but instead they created a monolithic botnet OS for advertising purposes that’s a huge resource hog and has a lot of unnecessary bloat like extra context menus and unnecessary services. 11 is even worse.
Explorer.exe was half-rewritten for Windows 11, for the first time since XP. That’s why the file explorer, taskbar, and context menus are all sluggish trash.
Speaking of context menus…
*2 - Steam still works on 7 with some tinkering, but it’s only going to get more broken as time passes. You can still get it running to some degree on XP even, but most games won’t launch and downloads have been broken for years. You can still use the community features, but not much else. So it’ll go for 7 as Valve update things (both client- and server-side), so if you’re a gamer that relies on Steam then you’re just making your life more difficult for no reason. Of course, there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of other games which will work on Windows 7 just fine. Even something like World of Warcraft still officially supports Windows 7, with no current plans to drop it.
For just about anything else Windows 7 is perfectly viable. Web browsing should be fine for a long time to come, since Mozilla said recently that they’re planning to extend the EoL date for Firefox again.
I might only consider switching once I’m able to replicate my current setup on future Windows versions without suffering the heavy performance consequences.
I guess for now, I’ll have to force Studio to turn off auto-updates, and hope that by the time Roblox artificially cuts off support for the OS, there’s either going to be an official Linux build for Roblox, a sufficient alternative to the platform (@VisualPlugin ?), or something completely different.
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I’d like to see you try. Mod manager ?
No. I’ve done it before to keep the pre-Lua start screen (I still have that build on my computer!). It’s extremely trivial to do, but I haven’t done it as of late because that patched build of studio started having discrepancies between development & production.
Side note: It’s both hilarious and extremely sad that I also have to patch Studio to have a color theme that aligns with my Windows Classic colors. Old SystemMenu had that built-in because it used NATIVE windows controls for drawing UI elements.
Take a look at the Collaborate button that has a hard-coded color in it and few dozen errors from Roblox bloatware that shouldn’t even belong in a IDE environment!
14:50:24.249 Flag StyleRulePriorityOrderRefactor referenced from Lua isn't defined in C++ code - Edit
14:50:24.249 Stack Begin - Studio
14:50:24.250 Script 'builtin_AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.rbxm.AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.Packages._Index.DeveloperFramework.DeveloperFramework.Styling.shouldOrderStyleRulesByInsertion', Line 5 - Studio
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14:50:24.251 Script 'builtin_AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.rbxm.AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.Packages._Index.DeveloperFramework.DeveloperFramework.Styling.createStyleSheet', Line 1 - Studio
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14:50:24.251 Script 'builtin_AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.rbxm.AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.Packages._Index.DeveloperFramework.DeveloperFramework.Styling.createStudioDesign', Line 8 - Studio
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14:50:24.252 Script 'builtin_AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.rbxm.AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.Packages._Index.AvatarToolsShared.AvatarToolsShared.Components.AnimationPlaybackSlider', Line 21 - Studio
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14:50:24.253 Script 'builtin_AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.rbxm.AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.Packages._Index.AvatarToolsShared.AvatarToolsShared.Components', Line 2 - Studio
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14:50:24.253 Script 'builtin_AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.rbxm.AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.Packages._Index.AvatarToolsShared.AvatarToolsShared', Line 2 - Studio
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14:50:24.253 Script 'builtin_AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.rbxm.AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.Packages.AvatarToolsShared', Line 6 - Studio
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14:50:24.253 Script 'builtin_AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.rbxm.AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.Src.MainPlugin', Line 7 - Studio
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14:50:24.254 Script 'builtin_AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.rbxm.AvatarCompatibilityPreviewer.Bin.main', Line 72 - Studio
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Thanks, ROBLOX!
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So now my only options are Windows 10/11 (cannot upgrade to due to hardware limitations & the latter version has Recall, a glaring security risk) and Mac (a whole different platform that won’t mesh well with my projects, is more expensive and has a low performance ceiling from what I heard). I am now at the mercy of my current scenario leading me to getting a whole new computer just so I can actually continue using the platform OR Linux being supported by Roblox.
I get that you need to make updating Roblox easier, not having to worry about older OS versions, but there still exists a small portion of people who either cannot feasibly upgrade or won’t upgrade because later OS versions impede on their privacy, some of which are contributing to your platform.
You can fix this whole predicament of excluding people with old hardware by introducing Linux as an officially supported platform. It’s usable by almost any hardware and is guaranteed to be light compared to other systems, making it perfect for Roblox. On top of it all you’d keep any profits you would’ve lost by cutting off older versions of Windows, since most of those people would just go to Linux.
Until you provide official Linux support, I don’t recommend cutting any ties with older OS versions, especially when people on those versions have a likely chance of not being able to upgrade due to hardware not being beefed up enough.
This.
THIS.
Having to deal with Windows 10’s forced “Restart for update plz :3” prompt every other time I plan to do something on my now-dead laptop was torture. The amount of freedom you don’t have over your installation of Windows 10 is insane and (in my opinion) should be illegal.
Another reason why older Windows versions are much better than Microsoft makes them appear. They do everything that the typical user would need done, no bells or whistles. Any versions beyond them resort to filler features and improvements to their data harvesting on you.
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I’m sure the community can agree that we should also drop all old devices, including mobile devices.
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Yes… I do agree the Studio has a lot of bloat no matter the NextGen version…
Was it? Honestly the only thing you can complain about is the metro apps. Start menu, you could get used to it. But making a whole separate app environment that felt like using a mobile phone but worse… yeah that made zero sense. It was a solid OS at its core, though.