Many apps are now planning to follow that train due to the EOL and lack of support of Windows App SDK for below than Win 10, now defunct platforms. Windows App SDK provides a unified set of APIs and tools that can be used in a consistent way by any desktop app on Windows 11 and downlevel to Windows 10, version 1809.
So, warn your users. I have some die hard Win 7 users that probably will give me some headaches.
Why this is important? Because Xojo will follow that path too, soon, specially when enabling some features already on the roadmap as “Modern UI for Windows 10/11”.
7 was great - clear UI and the ability to store shortcuts to network drives in Quick Access. 10 is fine, but I kind of hate 11, useless and distracting changes just for the sake of change.
I loved Windows 7. In my opinion, Windows 8.x totally sucked. Windows 10 was a little better, but having the do updates behind the scenes on startup or whenever they felt like killed performance at the most inopportune times. I’ve not had much time to play with 11 much, but it does seem better than 10. I’m mostly Mac these days.
Windows 11 is still immensely backwards compatible. You can run applications in Windows XP compatibility mode. I even have an old game bought way back when I was running Windows 98. It actually runs fine on Windows 11, using Windows XP SP2 compatibility level! I don’t see any reason why it would not be possible to run old Xojo applications on Windows 11 in most cases. Surely there are exceptions and edge cases.
Run old apps in Win10+ OSs is not a problem, the problem is that current apps won’t run on those dead OSs. Soon, as other tools, Xojo will need to remove Win7, Win8, Win8.1 options from their current compiler. It simply would need a double effort to maintain. People wanting to continue supporting those platforms will need to use the last stable compiler able to do that.