Other than the current update failing (judging by the many posts about it I'm not the only one), I have been using Galaxy 2.0 on my Windows 7 PC up until now without issue. Am I missing something, or not using a particular function that doesn't work for others in W7? Just curious, as I wasn't aware of dropped support.

He probably just forgot to install required runtimes.

Dependency Walker should help.

Guys, don't forget where you are. This is good OLD games, many people here use GOG for retro PC gaming, setting up systems from Windows 95 all the way to current to play the games on. It's not hard to make an app versatile enough to support everything from XP to Windows 11 in one version, many apps I have already do this. It's the fact that Steam is invasive DRM and won't let me log in on WinXP that brought me to GOG because I didn't know about offline installers. Luckily my PCs at home are networked, otherwise i'd be stuck walking a USB drive back and forth just to install my games. An app would make is easier, but I suppose it's a big ask.

That program would require a network as well, the games don't just magically appear on your system.
(WinXP has no MS Store and therefore no Apps anyway)

If you have a Good Old Operating system, you certainly won't mind to apply a few tweaks to make modern software run on it, right?

why = https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-of-support

translation = thats it guys times up

Yes, but that's games, not new applications like GOG Galaxy. And GOG itself is about running OLD games on MODERN operating systems, that's the whole main purpose of it. Not to sell and run games on Windows 98/XP/7, because that can be done directly without any fixes needed, i.e., if you can run Windows 98 on your machine, you don't need all the fixes provided by GOG that allows the old game to run on Windows 10.

Is the entire GOG library (including games no longer sold) now 100% W10 compatible? Genuine question, as I remember only a year or two ago it wasn't...

Even if not I guess there's always the stand-alone installers (which they *would* need to keep compatible with older OSes), but if GOG knows their customers and the niche they operate in they could probably create a lot of goodwill by keeping W7 supported with Galaxy. I know *I* at least would be very happy with that, and I dual boot W7 and W10.

As a side note I see lots of small indie devs in the emulator scene supporting wide ranges of operating systems, sometimes all the way back to WinXP, and some of these offer amazing functionality. So I can't imagine such a thing would be completely impossible to maintain.

My stance is that's it's largely irrelevant if official support was dropped by Microsoft: if this community has a use case for remaining to use Galaxy on older systems and operating systems, it might be good business for GOG to keep supporting it. As far as I'm concerned in a 'limited functionality' / 'frozen' version that just installs and updates games.

No. Even some titles that GOG claims are supported on W10 and W11 in fact aren't (from recent personal experience: IL-2. Claimed to be supported, but completely broken and it's even clearly shown on the forums)

I wonder if they do, and if so, how many are running W7 or older (and out of those, how many are spending enough cash to fund the extended support).

Not impossible, but hard. They would either have to have dedicated hardware that runs W7 and is disconnected from their corporate network, or run it on virtual machines. And all the tools would have to be maintained, etc... Yeah, would be interesting to see what happens, i.e., if they continue supporting W7 for newly introduced games.

no the library list are mostly just copy and pasted bullshit but 2 examples;

Wizardry 8 doesn't install the save game samples if you put it on Windows 10 [forum users have posted these with instructions] and thats a simple code fix because Microsoft changed where the Documents folder live

KOTOR will not run on Windows 11 because Microsoft changed their code... in fate many older games won't run on W11 because of this and thats a much harder fix that will basically require a remake of those old games to get them working

other old games like the star trek battles range are key locked to older system code... in one case W7 only and those games have disappeared from the public eye now

in sort, 2 years from now when W11 becomes your only option a generation of kids will have no clue who Revan is

Windows 7 is officially dead, all official support for the operating system has ended

"After 10 years, security updates and technical support for Windows 7 ended on 14 January 2020"

the thing is that they could just add an option to stop the auto update feature of the client and then one could run the last working version on W7 and this would cost them nothing. a lot of the fixes for games to make them work on newer systems are from other people and they just collate them to make things easier on users, and this could be done for their client if they want to lend a bare minimum amount of support for newer versions. there are a ton of options, but requiring one to upgrade their OS is probably the worst option.

Their official support wasn't worth much when Windows 7 was still supported. So I don't see what that changes.

what it changes is a legal issue... you can't support a system that isn't itself supported

gog can say try it and see or G wiz we assume it may still work but they can't support it

You absolutely can. Why wouldn't you? Steam does, Firefox does also and the last time I checked so did the Unreal Engine toolkit.

Practically there's very little difference between Windows 7 and 11. In fact a lot of the stuff that claims not to work on 7 will work once you remove the version check. For example the latest NodeJS runtimes will refuse to install on 7, but if you get them installed they work fine.

Personally i use it as a benchmark of quality. Did they put the time in to actually test things or did they just tick the boxes for 10 and upload to the store. I find that the fun games somehow manage to support 7 while the soulless box-ticking exercises are Windows 10 only. Eg, Cyperpunk 2077 runs on 7 (although they removed official support a few months ago) and so does Half Life: Alyx.

In case you missed it: Steam ends Windows 7 support at the end of this year: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4784-4F2B-1321-800A

"In order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to update to a more recent version of Windows."