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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 02 2016, @03:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the tears-were-shed-across-the-land dept.

Microsoft continues to phase out Windows 7 and 8.1:

Out with the old, and in with the new. Microsoft yesterday stopped providing Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 licenses to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), including its PC partners and systems builders. This means that, as of today, the only way you can buy a computer running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 is if you can still find one in stock.

Two years ago, Microsoft stopped selling Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, and Windows 7 Ultimate licenses to OEMs. Now Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 are also out of the picture, leaving Windows 10 as the only remaining option, assuming you want a PC with a Microsoft operating system.

This is Microsoft's way of slowly phasing out old operating systems. The Windows Lifecycle chart for sales doesn't have an end date for Windows 10, since that operating system doesn't have a successor.


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  • (Score: 2) by blackhawk on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:28AM

    by blackhawk (5275) on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:28AM (#421567)

    A long time ago in a galaxy far away I was trying to run Linux as my desktop (circa 2001) and was pretty happy with KDE, but less so with the developer's editors available. I joined the team working on KDevelop (then called Gideon IIRC), and thus began a long cycle of pain.

    You couldn't just run the KDE that was available via APT, the IDE was targeting a newer version of QT and KDE than the major distros. So, to start contributing you needed to build the entire KDE project - a feat that took about 8 hours on my machine of the day, and that was fast hardware for back then. I would literally start up the build, go to work, come home and pray it built successfully - it usually did. I could then get in a couple of hours learning KDE and helping out with getting KDevelop written.

    Sadly, they used to switch up the version of KDE needed way too often, so instead of getting useful work done a lot of the time I could only sit back and watch GCC do it's thing for endless hours.

    Don't let that deter you. Contributing to an open source project is very rewarding if it's scratching your itch. It's fun, sometimes chaotic, and always hard work. You have the chance to shape a tool that might last far longer than you imagined. I put some time into a few open source projects - a little into Linux for XBOX, a bit into the XBOX controller code for the Linux kernel, and some into both Mono and KDevelop. It's really great to know that my code is still out there, helping in little ways for a lot of people.

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