GNOME's GTK+ Finally Getting Close To Dropping Windows XP Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME's GTK+ Finally Getting Close To Dropping Windows XP Support

GNOME/GTK+ developers are finally preparing themselves to drop support for Microsoft Windows XP...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK3-Drop-Windows-XP

[nanonyme]

Phoronix: GNOME's GTK+ Finally Getting Close To Dropping Windows XP Support

GNOME/GTK+ developers are finally preparing themselves to drop support for Microsoft Windows XP...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...rop-Windows-XP

Frankly the sooner everyone drops XP support, the better. Customers will follow when they have no choice. Luckily Chrome is dropping support soon so if Firefox does too, XP may finally start its death march

[Luke_Wolf]

I wholeheartedly support this. XP needs to die in a fire already. The tech industry shouldn't be held back simply because someone wants to run a 14 year old OS that isn't even supported anymore by it's creator which was forced to extend its already well overstayed welcome several times.

[GI_Jack]

good

As for industrial users, why do they need the latest version of GTK, why can't they use the old versions of GTK to match their old OS, to run on their old hardware.

As far as windows XP support, it would be like someone demanding kernel 2.4 support in linux, which was released around the same time.

[horizonbrave]

please seriously,
could I be illuminated on what is an industrial user? a sort of a steam-punk?

[TheBlackCat]

please seriously,
could I be illuminated on what is an industrial user? a sort of a steam-punk?

Running machinery, usually. Factories and such.

[Dedale]

Think big industrial machinery. Or a power plant. Expensive investments which takes long to pay off. Some still use PDP-11 computers from the 70s.

Why qualified engineers choose to use windows XP for such machines in the first place is a good question.

[BlackStar]

It's usually for legacy reasons, think a system that was built in 2003 but there hasn't been any reason to update. There's probably no internet connection or anything, just a system connected to machinery performing some automation / control task. Banks are still using COBOL codebases in their backends (30+ years!) so you can well imagine that WinXP will be still used for decades in some confined tasks.

GTK+ dropping WinXP support will not really change anything for these users, since they are written either in C++/MFC (Visual Studio 98 or so) or Visual Basic 6. It might be annoying for a few open-source cross-platform applications that still wish to support WinXP, but most of those are either using GTK+2 or Qt nowadays so not much is lost (e.g. MonoDevelop / Xamarin Studio.)

They heavyweights, Firefox, Chrome, Libreoffice already have native backends for each platform, so they won't be affected.

[nanonyme]

It's usually for legacy reasons, think a system that was built in 2003 but there hasn't been any reason to update. There's probably no internet connection or anything, just a system connected to machinery performing some automation / control task. Banks are still using COBOL codebases in their backends (30+ years!) so you can well imagine that WinXP will be still used for decades in some confined tasks.

GTK+ dropping WinXP support will not really change anything for these users, since they are written either in C++/MFC (Visual Studio 98 or so) or Visual Basic 6. It might be annoying for a few open-source cross-platform applications that still wish to support WinXP, but most of those are either using GTK+2 or Qt nowadays so not much is lost (e.g. MonoDevelop / Xamarin Studio.)

They heavyweights, Firefox, Chrome, Libreoffice already have native backends for each platform, so they won't be affected.

Typically though from WinXP to Win10 the former requires the most bubblegum code not needed elsewhere so any sane software developer will be happy to drop it whether or not they have native Windows GUI's

[curaga]

please seriously,
could I be illuminated on what is an industrial user? a sort of a steam-punk?

ATMs also commonly run XP.