64-bit Windows required for Installation

[cirrusio]

Ha.  I wonder if telling someone to calm down has actually ever worked in real life?  I don't know, but my survey suggests no...

Anyway - so obviously, I am not happy about this.  The choice to completely stop supporting Windows 7 is a choice that NI is explicitly making.  And this is not about Window's 7 vs 10 - that is what it is.  (Although I suspect that if you did a survey of customers you might be shocked at the number still operating in Windows 7 - and probably a some significant number that have an application that is running on many machines.)  This has more to do with 64-bit vs 32-bit and not the name of the OS.  And if the suggestion is that 32-bit machines are dinosaurs on their way out, well then I am not entirely sure how to respond to that.  This is an NI issue - not a Window's issue - and the response is flippant.  Many companies provide support for 32-bit machines; in fact .NET framework 4.8 is supported on Windows 7 and you can still develop applications for 32-bit Window's 7 machines using Visual Studio (and considerably older machines also). NI has made an explicit choice not to do that, thus leaving small partners in a bind.  When Microsoft said it would no longer support Window's 7 in 2020, this simply meant they would no longer provide software updates and security fixes.  They have a legitimate business interest to encourage users to move to the most recent version of Windows.  But NI's decision was driven by...what?

[rolfk]

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@cirrusio wrote:

But NI's decision was driven by...what?

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The desire to cut down on testing and support considerably. Every time you release a software you have to test it on about several dozen different hardware systems for each OS version you want to support. That is a very considerable effort and I can understand that a company wants to cut that cruft away as soon as an OS isn't officially supported anymore. And Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 fully, completely and definitely. So saying NI is the culprit here is a bit easy. While there may be lots of people still running Windows 7, they absolutely do that on their own risk and that includes being not only not supported by Microsoft anymore but pretty much anyone else too.

[cirrusio]

> So saying NI is the culprit here is a bit easy. While there may be lots of people still running Windows 7, they absolutely do that on their own risk and that includes being not only not supported by Microsoft anymore but pretty much anyone else too.

Absolutely!  But it seems what NI is saying is that we won't even let you take your own risk.  It's one thing to say that we will not support deployment on 32-bit machines, it's another thing to say you can not deploy on 32-bit machines (or we will make it incredibly difficult for you to do that).  The irony of limiting the deployment to 64-bit Windows 10 is that the actual 64-bit version of LabVIEW is not fully built out itself.

[cirrusio]

FYI - NI Package Manager will not let you install prior versions of LV without the most recent version of the MDF so you can't even build out a VM with older versions (such as 2019) without this.