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Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8
- gitweb 6y agoI don't see the issue here. If you're going to update your drivers for an antiquated OS, might as well just upgrade it im the process. Switching to Linux would also give you much more flexibility for long-term maintenance.
- physicsguy 6y agoThat likely requires more in depth regulatory approval than just updating the driver for things like medical devices.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoWindows 8.1 is under extended support until January 10, 2023.[0] Why can Microsoft still support that system up to that date, but not let anyone else? [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/windows#what-is-the-lifecycle-policy-for-windows-81 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/windows#what-...
- baybal2 6y agoBecause they intentionally want to kill it, to force people into buying the new windows version.
- Kuinox 6y agoThe win10 update is still free.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoWindows Server 2012 R2 is impacted. Upgrades are not free. Upgrading the server necessitates updating Client Access Licenses (either purchased per-device or per-user) as well. Costs could be significant. If you've got a dependency on a driver that can't pass WHQL and you need an update, post July 2021, your only choice will be to dump Windows Server 2012 R2.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- EvanAnderson 6y agoWindows Server 2012 R2 is in support until 2023. Businesses have planned lifecycles and budgeting around that date.
- 51Cards 6y agoRead the article through for a much more comprensive view of the problem. It's not that simple.
- dcuthbertson 6y agoI have at least one customer who is stuck on Server 2012 (not even R2). I hope they will be able to upgrade their servers soon. In the meantime, if I need to update my driver, I'll have to replace my HCK test suite with the HLK test suite, learn the new process, and hope the driver passes.
- varispeed 6y agoWhy someone should install a new version of system that introduces all kind of spying and data harvesting just to use it as they used to? It's like saying oh you need to change the oil, why don't you buy a new car while at it?
- StillBored 6y agoAnd a UI that threw away a decade+ of desktop user experience metrics for a half baked not quite tablet UI on the desktop that still to this day is sub-optimal to the UI they had in win95.
- tupac_speedrap 6y agoI'd like to read the article but the sidebar keeps moving up and down the page and it's really irritating.
- bigbubba 6y agoAs is often the case, the article renders fine with JavaScript and CSS disabled. This sort of scenario is why I run uMatrix in whitelist mode, with JS/CSS always disabled by default. These technologies are net negatives to me, I only enable them on select websites and my browsing experience is more pleasant on average because of it.
- lollolintercha 6y agoDamn I never thought of doing it this way, how logical..
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kibwen 6y agoJS sure, but what benefit comes from disabling CSS? This is the first time I've heard of anyone doing so.
- ffpip 6y agoI think it is also used for tracking people. https://github.com/Bogdaan/spycss https://github.com/Bogdaan/spycss Or maybe he just likes content without flashiness and annoying sidebars, etc
- bigbubba 6y agoOften obnoxious stuff like headers that follow you down the page are implemented in CSS. It also neatly deals with sites using gray on white text, absurdly narrow text columns, etc. It also neuters most cookie notices and similar BS that uses CSS to block visibility of the article until you remove it with ublock origin's element zapper. Instead of zapping things all the time on each new site I visit, I nuke it first and ask questions later.
- fartcannon 6y agoIt's painful to repeatedly witness people voluntarily buy into ecosystems maintained by people with perverse incentives. You can't fault MS, making more money is their raison d'etre. If you care at all, even the smallest amount, explore the alternatives.
- spaetzleesser 6y agoMost of us don't really have a choice though. In larger companies a lot of decisions are being made by higher-ups before technical people even get a chance to look into the issue.
- Someone1234 6y agoThere's no commercial vendor without "perverse incentives" if "making money" is on the list. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Google, or anyone else. Essentially you're arguing that it is Linux or nothing, but in a very roundabout way.
- TheSoftwareGuy 6y agoLinux is not the only OSS Operating system. OpenBSD, FreeBSD exist, just off the top of my head
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoIt isn't a real alternative if it is a bad fit for what you're trying to do with it, which those are for many many people.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoSome are more perverse than others, depending on who their customer is.
- doikor 6y agoMicrosoft did (still?) offer a free upgrade path from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 for years so I doubt this is really for "getting money from our customers" but more "we want to stop supporting these old platforms at some point"
- bgorman 6y agoCan anyone explain to my why people are creating new embedded systems with Windows? It seems to me that the developer experience, ecosystem and driver support is worse in literally every single way, not to mention you don't have control over the OS code.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoWorking video support (without hardware acceleration) out of the box without any external drivers for all current and future graphics cards because they actually implement the “core” vga spec (plus all the official and unofficial revisions to get higher resolutions working). We have to ship updates to our bootable Linux and BSD applications every six months just so customers don’t get stuck in text mode, or worse yet, without a frame buffer after BIOS posts. Never had that problem with WinPE (RIP).
- dvdkon 6y agoMy go-to solution to booting an older Linux version on a newer GPU is `nomodeset` and possibly other flags that force-disable the use of device-specific drivers. I don't see how this is different on Windows.
- freeone3000 6y agoWindows doesn't require a list of unspecified kernel flags to get a UI, it just gets one.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThat wasn’t a hypothetical, and yes, I looked for simple kernel cmdline parameters before hacking away at the VGA and UEFI framebuffer drivers in the kernel. I’m not talking about KMS, that’s another ballgame altogether. You ship a fixed image starting up on unknown hardware that could have any card from 1999 to 2020 in it. You can’t load all drivers at startup because a) that’s crazy talk, b) many can’t be loaded simultaneously anyway. You can manually identify the VID and PID and create a database but it’s a monumental task, and you’re bound to miss some (and what about new releases?). You don’t want to ship with every driver under the sun anyway, because that’s huge, there are licensing issues, and many are buggy or error prone on recent kernel releases. All you want is a basic driver to give you a software-accelerated framebuffer and use the generic VGA/SVGA/XVGA/whatever standards to init the hardware, give you a workable resolution for GUI mode applications, query the monitor and use the EDID database to select a resolution and refresh rate supported by both the hardware and the attached display device, use the correct aspect ratio, avoid overscan or unnecessary scaling, etc. and give you an abstraction supported by your desktop environment including the window manager and your applications, without needing to hack away at every program you ship with to get them to support the sw framebuffer. Xfree86 was such an effort but a) it’s long dead, and b) never really got there.
- varispeed 6y agoWhat Microsoft is doing should be illegal. If you buy a product, you should be able to use it throughout your lifetime or until the product naturally cease to operate. In this case, Microsoft should release an open source tool to cross sign the drivers if they don't want to support it or add an update that disables checking for signatures. If a company can disable software features in the future, then you are no buying the product but merely renting it. Imagine if you bought a car and then 5 years later company rep would come in and welded the wheels so that you wouldn't be able to upgrade your tires. That wouldn't fly, so why software companies are allowed to do this?
- FreakyT 6y agoCompletely agree -- this is even worse for mobile phones, where often it's impossible to even upgrade the OS past the one it shipped with. The second a company stops supporting a product, they should be legally required to fully unlock the bootloader/drivers/etc.
- PieUser 6y agoI completely disagree.
- varispeed 6y agoDon't forget about OS updates that disable phone features. For example Samsung ran an update that disabled phone call recording. If you wanted a phone so you can record your calls to elderly parents to have memories of them, you could no longer do that after updating the phone and there was no warning that such update does that.
- TheCraiggers 6y ago>If you buy a product... Ah, but you don't buy this, you license it. That's where they get you. I agree it's very anti-consumer, but it's going to get worse. > Imagine if you bought a car and then 5 years later company rep would come in and welded the wheels so that you wouldn't be able to upgrade your tires. Did I mention it will get worse? Maybe not with the silly welding tires example, but we're basically there. John Deere, Tesla, Apple, and others are all deploying clever tactics to lock the consumer out of the things they buy so that they can rake in even more cash.
- cpgxiii 6y agoThe title is a gross exaggeration of the policy change MS is making. Come 2021, what will go away is the ability to sign drivers for Windows 7 and 8 without passing WHQL/HLK compliance tests. That's it. You can still update compliant drivers, and you can still ship unsigned drivers if your users are willing to disable signing (not great, but there are plenty of shitty vendors who do this already). Are there some number of important drivers that absolutely can't (rather than currently don't) pass WHQL/HLK tests? Sure, but I can't help but feel that the main "victims" of this will be shitty vendors with buggy drivers that have lagged in supporting newer Windows variants (and have thus kept their users stuck on older variants). Is OSR one of these shitty vendors? Maybe not, and they are a paragon of quality stuck in a rare corner case of WHQL/HLK compliance. But it does sound like they have spent the last year complaining about the policy change rather than working to meet WHQL/HLK compliance - I don't see any evidence in their post of working with MS to improve the WHQL/HLK tests.
- StillBored 6y agoHow do you permanently disable signing on 64-bit win7? Last I checked it wasn't possible to do cleanly, you end up needing user interaction for every boot, or you get a nag border. So, its a big deal.
- freeone3000 6y agoThe nag border is only visible with the desktop showing, it's not a big deal at all.
- userbinator 6y agoI haven't checked in a while if a patch has appeared, but it's probably no harder than cracking activation, which is already well done. Once MS stops issuing updates, you don't have to worry about them reverting your changes.
- dblohm7 6y agoYeah, I have a hard time sympathizing with this. Windows drivers have become so much more stable since WHQL/HLK compliance became a thing.
- TillE 6y agoMicrosoft has repeatedly announced strict changes to driver signing policy while not actually enforcing them. Like last time I checked, their docs still claim that the HLK tests are required for drivers on Windows Server 2019, but in practice attestation signing works fine. I hope that will also be the case here.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoThis seems a common pattern with Microsoft, I've seen the same with changes to Printer Drivers.
- driverdan 6y agoYet another reason why centralized code signing is anti-user and a net negative. You should be able to easily install anything you want on your computer.
- jeffhou 6y agoAllowing unsigned drivers to be installed by the general user base seems more anti-user, no? My naive understanding is that drivers are low-level and thus malicious drivers would have more net negative impact on an unsuspecting non-technical user (relative to a piece of malicious non-driver code).
- pak9rabid 6y agoNot to mention that if a user really wants to, they can install unsigned drivers.
- acdha 6y ago> You should be able to easily install anything you want on your computer. This is the same as stating that you prefer many orders of magnitude more users to have unstable or insecure systems because they use products by a negligent vendor or are conned. That's hardly “anti-user” by any metric which covers mainstream users. To me, this is an argument that code signing systems need to be tightly regulated to prevent abusing the system for reasons other than quality testing and accurate labeling.
- dcuthbertson 6y agoWell, Msft attempts to use HCK/HLK to help ensure that the drivers out there are more stable. Once upon a time, there was no signing and some drivers caused the very unfriendly BSOD and Msft got the blame. There are a lot fewer of those today than there were before Msft insisted upon testing/signing things.
- intsunny 6y agoNvidia drivers were once responsible for 30% of all Windows Vista crashes. https://www.engadget.com/2008-03-27-nvidia-drivers-responsible-for-nearly-30-of-vista-crashes-in-20.html https://www.engadget.com/2008-03-27-nvidia-drivers-responsib...
- fortran77 6y agoApple stopped supporting Mountain Lion, released when windows 8 was released, in 2015.
- wvenable 6y agoI assume that doesn't prevent you from using it and installing software and drivers? Just because something stops being supported doesn't mean it should stop working as it did before.
- mynameisvlad 6y agoI mean, neither will Windows 7 and 8.
- toast0 6y agoIf the policy is followed, it sounds like driver signing will stop working as it did before. Presumably drivers signed before a certain date will work, but drivers signed after that won't. Or something.
- mynameisvlad 6y agoSure, but that doesn't "prevent you from using it and installing software and drivers". You can still install previously signed drivers. You can even turn on unsigned driver installation and install unsigned drivers. Nothing is really changing on the user's side. They might not get new drivers going forward if the company doesn't want to or can't pass HKL, but Windows 7 is out of support at this point. Windows 8 is still supported, to be fair, but I don't know of many people who actually run it; it's either 7 or 10.
- iJohnDoe 6y agoAnyone running these systems probably have hardware in place and don’t plan on changing said hardware. The reason these systems/OS are in place is because of, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it”. Probably not jumping to update drivers.