I want to use win7 "forever" and never upgrade to win10

What if certain things happen, like me and my Home Theatre builds and I need an ATSC 3.0 tuner and there are no drivers for anything older than W10? Or like what happened to my XP HTPCs when Firefox ESR was all that would run and now has stopped upgrading [for that I installed K-Meleon, an XP friendly browser, for TV and Movie listings] at v.52.9.0, the dialogue displaying clearly that I cannot upgrade on those machines. What will you do when that happens to W7? I'll probably go to K-Meleon as well, even though there's no easy way to transfer passwords. It sucks, I wish they would have just stopped at 7 and worked to improve the internals. I've never minded having to install my own drivers for each piece of hardware I have and don't get me started on UEFI and lockouts for anything but Windows. In that regard, I do expect SiliconDust to come out with HD Homerun network tuners that will run on the upcoming broadcast standard and they have drivers for other OSs. Plus the usual haunts out there like FileHorse/Hippo or Softpedia if all you need are the 2015 drivers without the fluff of later ones.

BlueGuy said:

What if certain things happen, like me and my Home Theatre builds and I need an ATSC 3.0 tuner and there are no drivers for anything older than W10? Or like what happened to my XP HTPCs when Firefox ESR was all that would run and now has stopped upgrading [for that I installed K-Meleon, an XP friendly browser, for TV and Movie listings] at v.52.9.0, the dialogue displaying clearly that I cannot upgrade on those machines. What will you do when that happens to W7? I'll probably go to K-Meleon as well, even though there's no easy way to transfer passwords. It sucks, I wish they would have just stopped at 7 and worked to improve the internals. I've never minded having to install my own drivers for each piece of hardware I have and don't get me started on UEFI and lockouts for anything but Windows. In that regard, I do expect SiliconDust to come out with HD Homerun network tuners that will run on the upcoming broadcast standard and they have drivers for other OSs. Plus the usual haunts out there like FileHorse/Hippo or Softpedia if all you need are the 2015 drivers without the fluff of later ones.

If you have enough memory in your computer (8GB or more), you could probably bypass this problem by running your older version of Windows in a VM. The VM will provide the functionality that is needed by Windows.

A few years ago (2013?) I installed Windows 2000 in a VM. It worked just fine.

swarfendor437 said:

Hi, If you want a GNU/Linux distro that looks like Windows 7 you should give Zorin 12.4 Core your attention or the Lite version. I wrote the unofficial manual for it here so you can get a feel for it:

Zorin Group Forum • View topic - Unofficial Zorin 12.x Core Manual - still work-in-progress!

I also used the evil Google docs to translate into French, Greek, German and Italian. In fact Zorin has replaced Windows entirely in the local government of Vicenza in Italy.

The City of Vicenza is Choosing Zorin OS | The official Zorin Blog

For me the base point of any OS is how good its Accessible features are. Zorin's menu is read properly by Orca the Gnome screen reader; not so in Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon edition. But I do like Cinnamon DE and if you want something faster than Mint look at an excellent fork that is superfast even in live mode: FerenOS -

feren OS, made for today's and tomorrow's generation - Home

I have yet to try out if it is better than Mint's Cinnamon desktop in respect of Accessibility.

Hi there Swarf. I am looking forward to the next Zorin release, slated for the Fall (?). As you may remember, I had to give up on Lite 12 as it just would not work right on this machine. But I have always loved Zorin OS in general, and will give it another go when 13 or whatever it's called comes out. I have tried many other systems, and few work on this machine. Usually it's an update that bricks it. This has happened with Manjaro, Solus, Deepin and several others. I won't use Deepin anymore as I've grown too paranoid about it being a Chinese system. With their IP thieving, it's too big a risk. Manjaro was great while it lasted. It was my first taste of KDE. But Kubuntu seems to be working perfectly, and I think my wife will like it. I have retained Linux Lite because it just keeps working. I tried LXLE and Ubuntu Mate, loved them both, but eventually they too had problems. Someday I will replace this computer, and hopefully then will be able to run what I really want, not just what works on it!

If you're willing to pay, you can now keep using Windows 7 with an additional three years of support from Microsoft:

Microsoft offers paid Windows 7 Extended Security Updates to Jan. 2023

Lady Fitzgerald said:

What upcoming broafcast standards?

Read all about it.

RC: HDTV Reception Forum Index
RC: ATSC 3.0 Ultra-High Definition (Page 7 of 7)

ATSC 3.0 or otherwise known as 4K TV

I do worry about newer applications, e.g. in the future (esp after 2020) not working with Windows 7/8/8.1 because of video problems... e.g. hardware support for newer versions of OpenGL and OpenCL. (I bought the laptop I'm currently typing on now because my older laptop from 2011 has coompatibility issues with these OpenGL requiring software)


Judging by the lack of any driver availability for newer graphics hardware, I wonder if 3D rendering software and games in the future will work with these older OSes.
I think the next generation of NVIDIA Graphics cards after the currently hyped RTX 20 series will definitely not be compatible with Windows 7/8/8.1, and I also doubt any AMD cards in the future newer than the new RX Vega will support these older OSes.
And also if a standard for web browsers newer and better than HTML5 will come and newer versions of browsers will not support Windows 7/8/8.1
When that day comes, I hope to switch to Linux and become a full-fledged Linux user. Or I will have to use a VM just for the browser...