Leaving a Legend: Saying Goodbye to Windows 7

[MayImilae]

A new article has been published on the Dolphin blog - Leaving a Legend: Saying Goodbye to Windows 7

Feel free to discuss the article in this thread.

[nyanpasu64]

I found some discussion of the Qt 5 UI lockup (fixed in 5.15.3 as well as 6.x) at https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/10546.

While setting up a retro system, I found out that there are actually third-party Qt 6 DLLs patched to run on Windows 7: https://forum.qt.io/topic/133002/qt-crea...-windows-7

However it requires matching up the minor (and possibly even point) version of Qt 6 with the particular DLLs you download. Also I don't know if these DLLs are safe, or if Dolphin will actually work on Windows 7 (my retro systems are not gaming PCs). Was the option of allowing unofficial Qt 5 builds with Qt 5.15.3 or kde/5.15 rejected? Qt 6 apps look somewhat ugly on KDE since the Breeze theme hasn't been ported to Qt 6 and released yet.

[JMC47]

Anyone can fork and maintain support of Windows 7 on their own, it'll just get harder and harder as things diverge.

[Franpa]

The only reason Windows 10 gained such a strong foothold in the Operating System space is because Microsoft very literally forcibly upgraded *everyone* to it for the first 1 or 2 years of Windows 10's life. The dialogue box that popped up asking if you wanted to upgrade? Clicking "No" counted as "Yes, but later" and clicking the X on the prompt counted as "Yes, but later", with "later" being around 2 weeks. This shit persisted for at least a whole year before Microsoft finally backed off... which happened to be when most people had already been forcibly upgraded.

I think after 6 months of this they revised the dialogue box so that you could no longer click the X and the text changed to mention you were merely delaying the inevitable. This was their response to the shitstorm from the general public.

[JosJuice]

Was the option of allowing unofficial Qt 5 builds with Qt 5.15.3 or kde/5.15 rejected? Qt 6 apps look somewhat ugly on KDE since the Breeze theme hasn't been ported to Qt 6 and released yet.

You can still build Dolphin for Qt 5 if you want to. At some point that option might go away, but that time is not yet.

[dezraj]

Hello! Maybe you could also mention in the article which development build is the latest to support Win 7 and 8. I think it's 5.0-16391, right?

By the way, according to this page, Windows 10 versions prior to 21H2 are no longer supported by Qt. Is this the case of Dolphin too?

I'm asking because I'm currently using version 1809 LTSC and it would be disappointing to have support dropped for this version too.

Thank you for your work and time.

[MayImilae]

1809 should work. It's a little confusing, but while Qt says 21H2 in their support page, if you look closely you can see that there is optional support to 1809. I've tested 1909 and Dolphin does indeed work there.

And 5.0-16391 is the final version that supports Windows 7.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

I'd be interested in user share amount for all OSes over the years since I can't be the only person that primarily uses Dolphin on a non-Windows system nowadays (the PC in my signature is not currently my primary but I've not updated my signature yet because my newly-updated hardware configuration is still not 100% certain).

...this does mean it might be a bit awkward if I ever make an updated Dolphin CPU benchmark for if/when a 6.0 ever gets released since I don't have any PCs running Windows 10 or newer (I went straight from Win7 to Linux and imported my existing Win7 installation into VirtualBox via Disk2vhd v2.01). That being said, the Windows version of Dolphin set to Vulkan actually did kind of work in WINE the last time I checked (around a month ago with WINE-staging 7.8 I think?). Though the need to really test and make a pre-assembled copy might be a bit of a moot point nowadays since one of the main issues was that Dolphin back in the 5.0 days required custom settings to properly run the delroth's povray EDIT: err, luabench homebrew benchmark, but nowadays it works just fine using the default settings.

On the subject of that, is a "6.0" version of Dolphin actually still going to be a thing?  The last time I asked, I dunno, maybe around a year ago, the answer was "yes but not for a while" and I just wanted to check in and see if this is still the case.


EDIT: Well isn't that something, this is quite literally my 777'th post on this forum, and it's in a thread about Windows 7... (it's also 02:27 as I type this and the forum says I first submitted this post 27 minutes ago).


EDIT 2: Heck the permalink for this very post of mine here is quite the visual pattern as well with mirrored digits (525 and 96) with the remaining ending digit being none other than a 7:

• https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-le...#pid525967
  

EDIT 3 Maybe I'm just stretching things now, but I could also say that 8, this post's number in this thread, is equivalent to the infinity symbol.  BTW it's now saying this post was originally posted 37 minutes ago relative to when I last reloaded the page.

[MayImilae]

On the subject of that, is a "6.0" version of Dolphin actually still going to be a thing?

I don't know, no one's working on it as far as I know. Everyone's busy making cool new things~

EDIT: Well isn't that something, this is quite literally my 777'th post on this forum, and it's in a thread about Windows 7... (it's also 02:27 as I type this and the forum says I first submitted this post 27 minutes ago).

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

777 GIF

[insert witty comment here about if you're heard about our lord and savior the animated PNG format]

Did you see my second edit? It gets even better.

EDIT: Heh, the mirroring digit thing happened on this post's URL too - 525 then 969.

• https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-le...#pid525969

I mean, it'd of course still be 525 and then likely 96 still, but to think it would be exactly only 2 digits later for the entire forum after my previous post to then line up for that...