Consider ending Windows XP support

[erengy]

Reasons to do so:

• Extended official support for Windows XP ended on April 8, 2014, which is about a year ago. No one should be using it anymore.
• XP users make up only 1.31% of the visitors of Taiga's website (I don't have any metrics on the actual users of the application, unfortunately).
• XP users can continue using v1.1 if they choose so. Upgrading to v1.2 isn't going to be mandatory.
• It has become a burden to provide backward compatibility. Just today, I spent hours to resolve a related issue.
• Taiga currently "works" on XP, but it looks quite bad due to missing default font and a couple of other minor visual issues.

What do you think? Is it time to move on?

[rr-]

If you ask me, it's time to start thinking about ditching Windows altogether in favor of Qt. 🐧

[erengy]

This issue would still be relevant even if we used Qt today, though. We're always going to depend on some Windows API, for media-player detection for instance, on Windows builds. Not to mention that I currently use Visual Studio's v120_xp platform toolset for backward compatibility.

[ConnorKrammer]

Windows XP currently has ~19% market share, but if I were to make an educated guess I would say the demographic using XP doesn't overlap dramatically with the anime-watching demographic--especially if they're using an open-source anime media manager.

And besides, the more people that end support for XP, the fewer people that will use it. We've got to start somewhere! It's unreasonable to expect devs to support XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10 (whenever it's officially released), plus whatever other platforms (Mac, Linux). That's almost 15 years of backwards compatibility to deal with.

[pixelPROPER]

I agree with ConnorKrammer. It's time to end XP support.

[Adyel]

Yeah, I mean it's 2015 who's still using xp?

[ConnorKrammer]

Well, apparently 20% of all pc users :P
Poor souls.
On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 4:18 AM, Adyel Ullahil Mamun notifications@github.com wrote:Yeah, I mean it's 2015 who's still using xp?

—Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[rr-]

I don't blame them, to me new Windows looks like poop. If I could, I'd still use the old theme. Apparently, getting it right is too much for Microsoft.

A screenshot from 2009:

[pixelPROPER]

For me, the old and classic themes look horrendous. Still, I often find myself just using custom themes since the default isn't that good.

Wouldn't a majority of that 19% share be installs for businesses that refuse or can't upgrade?

Anyway, XP support for Taiga should definitely be dropped to focus development for newer versions, or at least to lighten the load on energy even if it's just a tiny bit.

[vendethiel]

Wouldn't a majority of that 19% share be installs for businesses that refuse or can't upgrade?

US governement... That and some asian countries as well, I think.

[ConnorKrammer]

Another good way of looking at it is by consumer PC replacement rate. I found a figure from 2012 quoting it at 20%, or about once every five years. That's the mean, and I couldn't find anything on standard deviation, but since most computers from ~5 years ago no longer offered Windows XP as an option I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of users are no longer using it as an operating system.

[erengy]

Steam's hardware survey results are possibly a close approximation for Taiga users:

OS Version	Percentage
Windows 7 64-bit	46.72%
Windows 8.1 64-bit	27.63%
Windows 7	10.87%
Windows 8 64-bit	3.76%
Windows XP 32-bit	3.73%
Windows Vista 64-bit	1.05%
Windows 8.1	0.63%
Windows Vista 32-bit	0.58%
Windows 8	0.29%
Windows 10 64-bit	0.22%
Windows XP 64-bit	0.14%

I imagine that in most cases, people are using XP out of necessity (i.e., their computers are very old). That said, weird things happen. There are still some people using earlier versions of Taiga (e.g. v0.9, v1.0.282) for instance, and apparently refusing to upgrade.

Anyway, I released v1.2.0-beta a couple of days ago, without XP support. We'll see if we'll get any reaction to that.

I should also note that, if it ever becomes necessary, dropping Vista support will almost definitely be a non-issue.

[Jiyuu]

Why not add -optional- OS reporting for taiga? or is that too much of a PITA?

Anyhow for what it's worth i don't see the issue with removing support for XP..

[erengy]

It's been two weeks since the release and only a single person has complained so far. 👻

Note to self: Provide a download link to the last version with XP support, then close this issue.

[Revemohl]

Would it be too selfish of me to ask for reconsideration of this, or at least for someone to hand out a tiny XP-related fix for the program? Because thanks to the HTTPS change on MAL's side from some time ago, old versions of Taiga are now completely useless.

[erengy]

Sorry, I have no plans to bring back XP support. I normally don't mind making custom builds for people, but it'd take quite some effort to port the latest version to XP, and spending my time working towards newer versions seems more reasonable at this time.

If anyone else would like to give this a try, this is how I would go about doing it:

• Change the project's platform toolset to Visual Studio 2015 - Windows XP (v140_xp).
• Remove the _WIN32_WINNT=0x0600 preprocessor definition.
• Compile, test on XP, find and modify incompatible pieces of code, repeat.

Alternatively, you could try using some local proxy that would translate Taiga's HTTP requests to MAL and MAL's HTTPS responses to Taiga. I don't know how to do this, but perhaps stunnel would work. Of course, using an old version of Taiga will still cause problems due to changes such as the latest one in MAL API.

[rr-]

You could also ditch MAL and switch to text files.
(I'm only half joking)

[Revemohl]

Technically, wouldn't it be possible for someone to go through the code of a version before 1.2.0 and replace all instances of HTTP with HTTPS? Although yeah, there's also the API change which might make fixing this take a bit longer.

And yes, it seems notepad is still the MVP.