Comment on the Windows 10 blog post

General
1

I wanted to post this since Xojo seemed to hint that they might drop Windows 10 support soon-ish.

There are some things to consider here.

  1. The fact that MS offers paid extension of support means its still supported OS.

  2. There are Several Windows 10 variants that have still support even without payment

    like this one here:

    Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2019 (also known as LTSC 2019) will end support on January 9, 2029. While most other Windows 10 editions reached their end of support on October 14, 2025, LTSC versions have different, extended lifecycles.

    There are newer versions of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB, that have even longer end of support than 2029.

    So basically Windows 10 is not going away any time soon. At my work we deal a lot with the LTSB versions.

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2

Well, isn’t this all more like a scare tactic?

As long as there are 100 millions of Windows 10 computers out there, Microsoft has to do something.

And for Microsoft the announcement is to scare people to move to Windows 11.

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3

Considering Microsoft’s support page is titled “Windows 10 support has ended on October 14, 2025”, I don’t think they’d agree with that broad assessment.

Our blog post is a reminder that since Microsoft has started making it clear that it no longer supports Windows 10, we will eventually follow their guidance.

seemed to hint that they might drop Windows 10 support soon-ish.

As the post states, expect our Windows 10 support to end at some point in 2026. If I had to guess, I’d say late 2026 and not early 2026.

4

You can literally see end of support for all the LTSB versions on Microsofts web, there is no assumption there.

Here is the one for the 2019, the later versions go all the way to 2030 something.

Many expect they will extend the one year paid extension on the main line not only to cash in but because they need to make the security patches anyhow for the Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC versions that have far longer support lifetime. So its no brainier to expect the main line might get extensions one year at a time as paid support.

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image992Ă—458 16.4 KB

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The link to the above screenshot document is:

Just for the record.

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You’re actually both correct in your assessments, but alas the Windows 10 EOL is nuanced like many things.

@Paul_Lefebvre You’re correct in that the “Consumer” version of Windows 10 has indeed been EOL’d.
@Björn_Eiríksson You’re correct in that the “Commercial/Enterprise/Education” versions of Windows 10 have NOT be EOL’d

From what I’ve gathered, here’s the breakdown with EOL dates:

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019
January 9, 2029

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021
No publicly listed date but based upon the IoT version date I think it’s save to say it’s 2032.

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2019
January 9, 2029

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021
January 13, 2032

With that said though, it’s unclear what percentage of Windows 10 is actually LTSC, but some estimates put it at 2%. If Windows 10 is 41.74% of the Windows install base, and there are 1.4 Billion installs of Windows, then LTSC would be about 12 Million. Not a huge number, but in certain silos definitely something that could be critical, static and non-moving (e.g. try convincing a larger corporation to move to the next version of Windows if they’re not ready, have support for the existing version and want to keep costs and risks low).

So for anyone using Xojo in a commercial/corporate/education scenario, the decision to drop Windows 10 support in Xojo will be detrimental to Xojo developers including those who might be citizen developers.

Just like most devs, I’m generally happy to EOL support for older OSes as it makes code TLC, validation and support that much easier, so I completely get where Xojo is coming from. But maybe 2026 is too soon and things should go another year or two past 2026, or maybe take it on a year by year basis based upon Xojo dev feedback and market trends?

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7

This is still the “getting the word out on Windows 10” phase of things. We will know more as 2026 progresses. It is also possible we deprecate IDE support for Windows 10 before we deprecate built app support, which I believe is something we’ve done in the past when necessary.

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8

Xojo needs to support the operating systems we need to support. If you drop support for it too early then Xojo customers will have no choice but to switch to something else or to stay on the versions they currently have. Neither of those are a good long term strategy for Xojo.

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9

it would be interesting to know how many Xojo copies of the current version run on Windows 10 vs 11.

Like don’t remove it until it is 90% Windows 11.

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10

Windows 10’s market share is more than hanging in there despite being at end of support

I agree. Windows 10 have 80% market share for Greece and 45% for Europe.

11

I’m writing my first application that will be sold commercially and it will be on this exact Windows Enterprise edition that’s supported until 2029. Users of the system that my software is running on cannot upgrade the OS to 11 until the manufacturer of the device that the computer came with updates their software. And their software requires third party drivers as well as other things that are not yet working properly on Win 11. It’s pretty high performance stuff with a lot of moving parts (their software, not mine).

But the point is, some of us need to support Win10 for some time, and dropping support for it in Xojo is going to be a real pain. When 11 or newer versions are supported, I expect it will take some time for the userbase to migrate so we’re expecting to have to support Windows 10 for at least 2-3 more years.

12

Opinion :

There is simply no need for Xojo to drop support for Windows 10.

To me, the only thing that would make Windows 10 unsupportable in Xojo is if they hard coded a new feature that was Windows 11 only on the basis of some DLL or library that only exists in Windows 11.

And if that was referenced in a plugin, it could probably be compiled away anyway.

If all that Xojo does, can be done in Windows 10, there is no need to kill off support just because Windows 11 exists.

I’m guessing there is still much that Windows 10 does that Xojo doesn’t support even now…

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13

Windows Server 2019 is akin to Windows 10(1809).

Server versions tend to be updated less frequently then Desktop builds.

I think understanding how many users still host services (console apps AND web apps) on Windows Server 2019 is also something I think is worthy of consideration.

Anthony

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