In blender 3.0, Another reason was to support 3 functions to query and control pen pressure (That i can understand, You can still maintain an official windows 7 branch for it).
People are not aware for what NONSENSE blender maintainers removed windows 7 support that didn’t need to be removed, alienating 10% of the market that doesn’t wish to have backdoors and forced update and gimmicky windows metro UI.
When i asked about it when it was relevant , i was told that its because “Windows 7 has reached the end of its lifetime”, Well, that being the case, i am still asking if we can maintain a windows 7 branch, Consider that after all of the issues mentioned above, they are “Non-issues” (In my humble opinion) at all and there is no reason not to support it.
Thanks in advance.
Edit : I have accepted LazyDodo’s respond as satisfying for me, Thank you.
That’s the great thing about open source, you are absolutely free to do these things if you want, however maintaining special windows 7 branches and shipping a modified python library (and any of the other libraries that’ll start to use win7+ stuff over time) is not something blender as a project ought to be doing.
It’ll be an uphill battle that’ll require more and more time and resources every time we update the libraries blender depends on, to service a group of users that’ll get smaller each version, resources better spend elsewhere.
Obviously, but the biggest miss, The decision was made before a new LTS version (v2.93) released and a new massive update (v3.0) , maybe now at version 3.0 after a huge overhaul in blender, Will be a good stopping point.
And yes, people do make their own versions and open source is indeed great.
We needed the python update to resolve some outstanding bugs we were having, shipping a modified python just isn’t an option, so the choice was to ship 2.93 with known bugs we can’t solve which isn’t great for an LTS release, or ship it with python 3.9 and upset users on older hardware. We chose the lesser of the two evils, but opinions on that are clearly divided, either way, what is done is done and there are currently no plans to revive windows 7 support.
Is there any reason why you have to/want to stick with Win7?
You already know and wrote that Win7 is EOL, and we’re already in Win11 territory atm.
You can still upgrade for free to Win10 with some little steps, and performance is nothing different.
So again, what is your reason to stick with Win7? Just curious…
dropping the win7 support makes it possible to implement more win7+ features and removes a system to take care off and solve bugs. I understand that you dont like win 10/11 and dont want to update, but Operating systems are dead after some time and win7 is dead for 2 years now. MacOS ist supported from 10.13 and up, thats from 2017 so no difference there. You cant support an OS forever. How long do you plan to use win7? You have to update windows or switch to a different os anyway.
I did respond as to “why i don’t like windows POST 7” , in a nutshell ,
i wrote the UI is clunckier,
more backdoors ,
more cloud based / online services dependency (And if you are still provided with local products, rest assured they are connected to a cloud service),
more difficulty in blocking updates (Sometimes, you need a stable environment and you don’t want to update, As developers, You guys are aware how important it is to maintain the same environment you use to release binaries from).
*Reading into lazydodo’s comment, It seems like there was little choice left and again, i can understand that.
I understand your perspective. But windows 7 is already abandonware. And practically no software supports it (for example substance painter, designer, Maya, Max, Modo, Cinema 4D, Photoshop, Unreal…). If you need a stable environment to work with blender you have linux. And if you need windows except rare exceptions you will be working with old versions of the software. So I see no reason not to work with old versions of blender.
With linux, the territory comes with drivers support and lack of (Which is the main issue).
As far as not working with older versions of blender, Finally getting “Linking” objects to a more usable state and the addition of asset browsers (In version 3.0) are both time savers, and in the end , time is money.
But beside that, i am satisfied with the answers given so far.
May i please have references as to what caused the decision regarding python and what prompt the change to a newer version? (As in, do you have discussions / back and forward with other developers about the issues that prompt the usage of a newer version?)
I am asking only because i am curious, nothing more, I want to study the cause for my own interests.
within context, the “NONSENSE” part was on the ease of overcoming this problem with a simple hack, i was saying that a bit more leg-work for a hack-around and it could have worked in an official way.
As far as the issue of hacking-around-the problem, it was addressed , and i meant every word.
That is an incorrect assumption. Take current master and then make all the changes needed to get it to compile on Windows 7 and using the current version of Python. I would wager that it would require more than something considered “simple hack.”
Not to disturb this …whatever it is… but it’s good to keep in mind, what can be hacked around and what we could sanely support, may not always be the same things.
Indeed, I do believe that i wrote in my original post an edit that i find the developers reasoning and choice to be logical, I didn’t know the scope of the problem (To be honest, i am still unsure off the scope of the problem), Hacking around is indeed a few lines job, But from my understanding, it will cause problems.
(Although i am using a hacked version of blender 3.0, INCLUDING writing python scripts and all is well for me) (Python version in blender , Reported as : 3.9)
The scope of the problem is the rest of the world have moved on from win7 and started to use the newer windows 8+ API calls, that’s not going to stop, blender depends on a good 30ish external libraries. the time you’d have to invest and backporting everything to win7 just isn’t worth the time. If this dll hack is working for you, that’s great, it’s just not something we’d want to ship/support.
Immediately after the change of Python version, and the new requirement for a new Windows, it was indeed possible to do simple hacks to get it to work. But almost every day since it has diverged more and more. We are able to simplify code by not having to allow compiling for Win7. So for example there were many Windows API functions that we could now link to statically, rather than load dynamically. The changes now are very large and I would not recommend anyone taking their time to attempt it.
