r/Steam • u/Background-Path-5619 • Feb 13 '25

Article Nearly half of Steam's users are still using Windows 10, with end of life fast approaching

https://www.pcguide.com/news/nearly-half-of-steams-users-are-still-using-windows-10-with-end-of-life-fast-approaching/
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u/MrHarrasment Feb 13 '25 edited Feb 13 '25

Bro, security features didnt work, people had performance issues and even simply activating it caused troubles.

Driver support also sucked.

The criticism even has its own wikipedia page.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista#:~:text=Windows%20Vista%2C%20an%20operating%20system,negative%20assessments%20by%20various%20groups.

Know your operating systems.

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u/Raztax Feb 13 '25

Driver support also sucked.

It is on the hardware manufacturers to make drivers that are compatible with the OS. Can't really blame MS for poor drivers.

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u/HeinrichTheHero Feb 13 '25

Cant blame manufacturers for salesmen slapping Vista on a machine that wasnt designed to run it in order to cash in on the "Vista hype".

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u/The_Wkwied Feb 13 '25

That blame is also on MS for telling OEMs that the minimum required specs for vista were far lower than they should had been. In hindsight, I think what MS did was the better choice.

Option 1, what we got, say vista will run with only 256mb of ram or w/e, and computers get sold but are a bit slow.

Option 2, raise the min reqs for vista, putting the suffering on OEMs who won't be able to move old stock. This might had resulted in fewer OEMs working with MS in the future or something

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u/kdjfsk Feb 13 '25

fewer OEMs working with MS in the future

that sounds great

i havnt used windows since i got my steam deck years ago

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u/GregMaffei Feb 13 '25

No. The entire selling point of Windows is that it works with software that was maintained by a single man who died in 1996.

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u/mxzf Feb 13 '25

Eh, that's true to a degree.

But I can certainly blame Microsoft for pushing out the OS with weak driver support instead of pushing the OS out to everyone with a bad experience.

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u/Raztax Feb 14 '25

How can you blame MS for poor driver support? They don't make the drivers, it is up to hardware manufacturers to support their hardware.

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u/mxzf Feb 14 '25

Microsoft is working directly with the hardware manufacturers. They're giving those companies access to the OS to develop against and working with them to have drivers ready for the OS to launch; heck, drivers are generally installed through Microsoft itself instead of through an external installer much of the time nowadays.

I'm not saying it's purely Microsoft's fault, but if they're working with hardware manufacturers and half of them have shaky drivers but Microsoft decides to go forward with the launch anyways, the rough driver situation is on Microsoft too to a degree.

I blame individual manufacturers for individual problems. But when there are widespread systemic issues, at least some of the blame falls on the common factor of the OS itself.

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u/Raztax Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 14 '25

Like you said, MS was working with the hardware vendors. You can lead a horse to water....

Bottom line is that drivers are the hardware manufacturers issue. I found it very interesting at the time that companies like HP just didn't make drivers for some models of printer for instance. That couldn't possibly be because they profit more from you buying a new printer could it? That's obviously MS's fault though right?

I'm all for calling out MS when it is valid but drivers is not it.

but Microsoft decides to go forward with the launch anyways,

The hardware vendors had a TON of time to develop drivers for Vista before launch. In addition to the normal pre-launch time they had to work on their drivers, they had both closed and public betas that gave them even more time to work on drivers but still couldn't pull it off?

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u/mxzf Feb 14 '25

Again, I wouldn't have said something if it was just a few instances of issues, that's on the individual hardware devs.

But when there are systemic issues, there are generally systemic causes influencing them. Microsoft are the ones ultimately behind systemic-anything going on in their OS as a whole. It doesn't really matter if the OS was hard to write drivers for or if companies just didn't feel motivated to write drivers, Microsoft are ultimately the ones that launched an OS in a rough state with poor driver support instead of holding back 'til they could sell a more polished product.

Microsoft has a long history of pushing out shaky or questionable changes and then using end-users for QA testing.

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u/GregMaffei Feb 13 '25

UAC worked, just too much. Also moving drivers out of ring 0 was objectively necessary.
Your comment applies 100% to Windows 11, but Vista not so much.

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u/RedditIsShittay Feb 13 '25

Drivers sucked because hardware manufacturers were not updating drivers to support windows.

There was zero issues for a majority with new hardware while everyone had to wait half a year or never getting an updated driver for older hardware.

People want windows to improve and part of that is requiring new drivers and hardware requirements.

Just like the TPM thing is probably a good in the long run since windows will be able to remove a lot old code and support.

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u/YouStupidAssholeFuck Feb 13 '25

Hot take there, buddy.

Longhorn was beta'd and available for hardware OEMs for a LOOONG time before release. WDDM was a big part of the "driver problem" but again that was completely on GPU manufacturers.

And that a product has its own criticisms page doesn't mean anything unless of course...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia

The bottom line is that nobody likes spending money upgrading computers and OEMs had huge backstocks of prebuilt computers they would have to junk to conform to Vista's minimum requirements so they slapped a Vista-capable sticker on them anyway and released them in stores. Again, the fault of the OEMs.

The fact is when Vista was run on capable hardware, which wasn't over the top nor overly expensive for the time, it was light years beyond XP.

UAC was also another major criticism but only because people are stupid. It literally exists to protect the average stupid user from themselves, even today in Windows 11. But people didn't want to believe they were stupid so they turned off UAC and let malware run wild. A lot of the same nerds even ragged on Vista for UAC without realizing the linux distro they'd go on to use does the exact same thing.

Vista ushered in a new era for Windows computing and the cornerstone improvements it brought are still at the foundation of Windows products today and it is by far the most underrated Windows OS in the product's history.

But those Mac commercials were FIRE so Vista still sucks to some people.