It's not really a matter of cost of updating. Windows 10 *STILL*
activates using
Win7, 8 and 8.1 keys (including OEM licenses implemented via SLIC in
BIOS/UEFI
by using the COA key on the sticker or directly upgrading an activated
Win7 installation).
The update is actually free.
Stubborn users of Windows 7, fall down to two main categories:
a) Those who are afraid of the telemetry in Win10, which they think it's
spying onto them.
b) Those who can't stand the "Metro" aka "Modern" interface and have not
discovered
Open-Shell (the FOSS continuation of Classic Shell).
That's always excluding the enterprise where there are other factors
involved regarding
TCO, training employees, etc etc.
Frankly, the internals of 10 are such an upgrade from 7 that it's about
time people let
7 die in peace. We should not encourage the use of antiquated tech, when
there's
actually no cost factor involved and it's being done only because of
stubbornness
(and sometimes misinformation).
Since 7 has been effectively EOL'd, let's stop wasting resources on it.
People can upgrade for free. If they're so fixed onto their obsession
with 7 and wish
to keep using an EOL'd OS with no security updates, they can also live
using old
versions of wireguard or another solution. Although I believe most
developers will
drop support as well. I know I will for all applications I'm working on
that I have a say
in doing so or not. I have no intention of supporting deprecated OS
versions. It's
literally a waste of resources.
Soon it will be impossible to find drivers for any new hardware for it.
It's dead. Let's
just accept that and move on.
Panagiotis
On 10/11/2020 19:38, Andrew Fried wrote:
We recently began deploying clusters of recursive DNS "firewalls" that
use wireguard to secure and authenticate all traffic between the client
and servers. What we quickly learned was that virtually the entire
customer base in India uses Windows 7 almost exclusively.
I can certainly understand the desire to streamline development and
focus on current versions of client operating systems, but by
deprecating support for Windows 7 you would be reducing the number of
potential Wireguard deployments by hundreds of millions of users,
particularly in Asian and underpopulated communities in Africa. Most of
the end users there simply can't afford the cost of updating to the
latest version of Windows. I personally wish this were not the case,
but it is what it is.
Andrew
On 11/10/20 7:27 AM, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
Hi,
Windows 7 has been EOL'd by Microsoft since January of this year. It
is no longer receiving security updates or fixes. This email is to get
the conversation started about doing the same with WireGuard for
Windows.
Supporting Windows 7 is an ongoing maintenance burden. For example, we
use SHA2 signatures instead of SHA1 signatures for our drivers, which
is not something we want to compromise on, and as a result Windows 7
users must have KB2921916 installed. But Microsoft never supplied
KB2921916 via Windows Update and it removed all Windows 7 hotfixes
from its webpage last year. So in order to keep supporting this, we're
forced to add clunky disgusting code like this:
https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-windows/commit/?id=b63957dc830e39c94844d2f0d32ba29575991e44
Keen readers will wince at all the layering violations there. Do we
really want to keep maintaining gross stuff like this? It makes me
uncomfortable to have kludges like that sitting around in the code.
Shouldn't I write an auto-downloader that then checks hashes?
Shouldn't I build this into the installer? Shouldn't I.... waste tons
of time supporting Windows 7 better?
Probably not.
But I know so many users are still using Windows 7. I'd like to hear
from you to understand why, in order to assess when is the right
moment to sunset our Windows 7 support.
So, if you care for Windows 7, please pipe up! We're not going to
remove support for it overnight, and we're not prepared yet to
announce any sort of formal deprecation plan, but the world is moving
on at some point.
Jason
