You're sure you're talking about me?

And honestly... yes (but more due to the "every little counts" factor than the intrinsic increase in size, and even more so due to a CALCULATOR APP using 30 plus megabytes of memory or mainstream web browsers having pretty much become full operating systems)

Yeah (pretty surprised Microsoft didn't claim some veto rights over 16 GB nand models) but they sold quite a bit... like the underpowered netbooks 10 years ago

 

Other than things (usually malware) with VM detection or needing ISA cards or something similarly out there (I think my worst was an old Rover diagnostics machine with a custom BIOS that spun up an FPGA that spoke to a custom CD drive (this thing had CDs in cases you loaded into the drive), said BIOS did not support IDE CD drives either. Fortunately most people that needed it by the time I was involved mainly only wanted it to confirm that their Rover was "I'll provide the match" levels of beyond economical repair) I don't think I have had a program that refuses to run in a VM on a vaguely modern setup with proper CPU virtualisation support*. Worst that happens is when trying to migrate an OS over and it is locked to AGP (XP and older, don't know about Vista, changed some fairly fundamental things there at install time) when the VM pretends to be PCIe or vice versa.

*modern stuff is even doing PCI/PCIe passthrough these days, and USB passthrough has been a thing for years. I know I mentioned odd serial devices earlier but most of that can be sorted if you stump up the £50 or so for a full big boy USB to serial adapter that does all the 15V stuff.

 

Specifically I've been wanting to use MTV Music Generator (I know it's outdated but I know how to use it, and I find it useful) on a modern system but it won't run on anything past XP. And I've never gotten it running on a VM. Last time I tried was a couple of years ago because VM refusing to run it was so frustrating.

 

i can not answer both but i actually have a third OS installed, which is a 32-bit windows xp professional, because the mario teaches typing 2 program cannot run under the 64-bit version. my main OS is win 10 home 64-bit and secondary as win 7 home premium 64-bit. so the answer is yes, 32 bit os are still useful for some people

— Posts automatically merged - Please don't double post! —

and if you wanna go REALLY back you can go for a 16-bit os

 

I can't really think of any hardware that's 32 bit only that will actually run Windows 10 decently, so at this point we wouldn't lose much by dropping support for 32 bit hardware. Support for 32 bit applications would still have to be there, though.
Linux of course is another matter. That has a history of supporting ancient hardware and generally running pretty well on it (besides the more bloated applications, of course), and I don't see it dropping support for 32 bit any time soon. Individual distros may start dropping support for 32 bit to make it easier to maintain the distro, which is fine, those that need to can just switch to another distro.

I think that has to do with 16-bit emulation being dropped entirely in Windows 7, not whether the OS is 32 or 64 bit. You could maybe use DOSBox or something to run the installer. 16-bit emulation in Windows was never good anyway, DOSBox has always been a better option.
And frankly if the game is 32 bit it makes no sense for the installer to be 16 bit. Just a remnant of the past when Windows 9x was still the cool new thing and no one had imagined that future Windows versions might not be built on top of DOS, I guess. And laziness in creating or finding a setup program designed for current OSes.

Said hardware likely still runs an ancient Windows version and certainly wouldn't run the latest and greatest Windows version well enough (or at all) anyway so it doesn't really matter.

 

Is that so? I was under the impression 32-bit Windows 7 still included 16-bit compatibility.

One reason is if you have an installer designed to either (1) inform you you're using the wrong installer or (2) to choose to install the 16-bit or 32-bit version of a game. Regardless, the installers exist and it's necessary to maintain some level of emulation to get those 32-bit games to work. That's the price of maintaining backwards compatibility.

 

So your only 32-bit OS is nearly 20 years old... That has very little bearing on whether 32-bit operating systems should continue to be made, which I think is the real topic at hand.

 

DOSBox. I never would have thought of using that. I wonder if it's worth the trouble of figuring out how to set up DOSBox just to run one game though. I haven't had good experiences trying to get DOSBox running and doing what I want it to in the past. It's been some years now though, so I wonder if it's somewhat easier to use now.

What I was trying to install was an indie game, but even major games would sometimes do that. I mean, just for one example Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines (original disc release, of course) used a 16 bit installer. So when 64 bit Windows happened, it wouldn't install. There had to be a tool released by someone to install it on 64 bit Windows. I remember other games having the same issue despite the game being 32 bit.

 

I think you're confusing the OS with the DE. I agree that GNOME 3 sucks and is bloated as hell, but you have a lot of versions of Ubuntu which are the same thing, just with a different DE. I just wish they didn't drop Unity.

 

The problem is in businesses. At home, you'll cry a bit when your next-gen console isn't backward compatible, but you'll live with it. It's a new architecture, and by the time you're used to it, you'll laugh at all the "junk" you leave behind. Okay: some very retro-ish and cool stuff. That probably wasn't cheap, and even if it was it probably has nostalgic value.

Business, on the other hand, simply cannot afford to upgrade like that. They might have both hardware and software that suddenly refuses to work, and that can cause a whole chain of events happening. I mean...at my company we had to solve a nasty (but luckily pretty harmless) bitcoin miner worm this week. It got in through a windows XP computer. This is especially frustrating because our ICT department knew about the PC and its vulnerabilities, but it couldn't be replaced because it ran some sort of exotic kind of software that was absolutely crucial to the department, but where nonetheless nobody had a clue who built it or how to get it working on a recent computer. Result: "thanks to" this piece of malware, we stepped in and pretty much unplugged the device. Now suddenly, what had been lingering for months is fixed within a couple days.

Ahem...I know: the above story isn't exactly related to 32-bit but more about the way businesses work in general. It is also why windows continues to be successful, even though there's hardly any decent improvement on it in years. The same is true for 32-bit: at this point it's only there because of its legacy.

32-bits operating systems...of course linux distributions can chose to ditch them: as long as there are OTHER distro's that still offer it, those with outdated hardware can get it to work (the last distro that attempts to remove it will have some backlash, though ).
That ubuntu debacle isn't about that, though. It's about 32-bit software support on...well...ANY platform, really. They decided it wasn't worth pursuing the old architecture, which I can't really blame them for. And the userbase...it wouldn't be very diplomatic to call them greedy, but it's still the best description. And I've got to be honest: I'm greedy as well. Let's say investigation* would turn out that NOT having 32-bit driver support or installers or what have you would cause me to not be able to play ten of my thousand+ games on the system. In that case, my reaction would be "BUT I WANNA PLAY THOSE TEN GAMES!!!!". Because that is a quantifiable amount. Having a more secure, easier to maintain or otherwise better software environment is not something I can say I particularly care about as a consumer.



*in addition to greedy, I'm lazy as well: I have no freaking idea which of my games would be impacted in what kind of way in the first place.