[question] what do you suggest for windows 7 users ?

[John0King]

Description

what do you suggest for windows 7 users ? and also @WinUI-team .

Will you suggest me to use flutter / electron and goes away from .net platform ? or you suggest me stay in old place and can't get in to the newer .net community (separate .net community to two smaller community named old and new ) ?

and I feel whole windows develop happened in MS is a just like this image

and you get more 1 and drop more 1 too.

[saint4eva]

Windows 7 is going out of support. Does flutter support it? Kindly encourage your users to upgrade to probably Windows 11.

[John0King]

flutter use graphics engine (skia) to drawing every widgets , there no reason they cut windows support， and windows 7 is supported until 2023/1/1, and even after that time , the support for those users still depends on how many user use it instead of MS said they will not support win 7 or not .
and think about that if where are 30% users still use windows 7 , will Youtube/steam/twitch/facebook/EA/unity3d drop 30% users ?

and according to the data here, there are still nearly 15% windows 7 usres

[saint4eva]

Then use flutter - it would better fit your need.

[AlexByte]

there is some other language

[John0King]

@saint4eva what's wrong with Win7 ?
There is a silk.net why wont build a UI on that ? #2576
and look at vs code and electron , they use HTML to draw 的 UI , and it has notification, custom windows , many windows api ( I mean many api that win7 do not have that can be mock with custom UI/logic )

[CommonLoon102]

There are new features in newer versions of electron.js, if you want to use something new, for example new native calls to Windows 11 (new kind of notifications/whatever). So you would need to maintain two versions of your app, one is bundled with the newest electron.js, the other is bundled with an old one which still runs on Windows XP.

Regarding MS Teams, I guess they want to offload some parts of it to native handlers, like video chats, opening files and documents, etc. This way not the browser would handle most of the things and therefore it might be less memory intensive. But who knows.

[CommonLoon102]

No more Electron for Windows 7 either:
https://www.electronjs.org/blog/windows-7-to-8-1-deprecation-notice

[John0King]

there nothing effect when it drop support windows 7, because most of features that the old electron/browser don't have can be simply plug a babel translater or a polyfill, you can still write the newest javascript/typescript syntax and target both for windows 7 and newer. and that is not the same for .net . you have to choose : stay behind or move forward. stay behind means you can target both old and new platform but without the new platfrom feature; move forward means you drop many users/customs.

[CommonLoon102]

Up until TLS 1.3 becomes deprecated and all the servers stop using it. But that might be decades. Or months. Who knows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#Cipher

https://www.chromium.org/Home/tls13/

[CommonLoon102]

Actually, Windows 7 doesn't even support TLS 1.3, so when TLS 1.2 gets obsoleted and servers start using TLS 1.3, your electron apps on Windows 7 are going to stop. Except if you show local HTML files only.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62677922/is-there-a-way-for-windows-7-to-support-tls-1-3-net-4-8

[GeraudFabien]

https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux

[CommonLoon102]

MAUI-Linux is not even in beta.

@John0King Have you checked out the Uno Platform?
https://platform.uno/

It has Win 7 support, and also web, mobile, win10, linux, mac.

It is even better than Flutter, because you can do Ctrl+F in the browser and you can search for text.
You can also set the text selectable: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.ui.xaml.controls.textblock?view=winrt-22000
Copying also works when you select text.
Check out TextBlock in the Uno Gallery: https://gallery.platform.uno/

The only downside is the memory usage (at least on web for sure). If I open gallery.platform.uno then that tab consumes 2.2 GB in Chrome. That might be a problem if you want to open the site on mobile. But for mobile there should be an app version deployed.
Even a simple calculator consumes 500 MB: https://calculator.platform.uno/

[CommonLoon102]

What is wrong with .NET 4.8 and WindowsForms.NET for Win 7? It still runs on Win 11 too.

[CommonLoon102]

Actually .NET 6 runs just fine on Windows 7, so you could create a WPF (or WinForms) app on .NET 6 and then you will have access to the latest libraries, etc.

It's only the MAUI thing which wouldn't run, but what's good in it? It is mostly for mobile development (Android, iOS) plus it runs on Win10 so they don't have to emulate Android apps (what Win 11 can already do anyways).

If they really wanted to do a real cross-platform GUI ever, they would have already done it 10-20 years ago.

[John0King]

then you will have access to the latest libraries

Windows App SDK is also have gaps I think. it doesn't support windows 7 even things like camera or blue-tooth/usb (while those are became standard api in browse)

[John0King]

If they really wanted to do a real cross-platform GUI ever, they would have already done it 10-20 years ago

totally agreed

[CommonLoon102]

Have you checked out platform.uno?

[John0King]

tried on the web with the Xaml player , it's cool.

[Xyncgas]

For any platform, understand the display. For a 2D display you can write algorithms in any language you'd like, then proceed to drawing layout on the screen using whatever way you can. For Windows 7 .Net Framework worked in history, so has browsers, so has QT. Now you can create a layer that draw any rectangle you would like on the 2D display with the algorithms you've created on the UI framework (tools that utilize the operating system's api for UI) of your choice. Meanwhile absolute positioning was the only thing you needed.

Step 1. Write your algorithm down in a flow chart (E.g. how to crop a rectangle with another rectangle, how to automatically fill a rectangle with small rectangle of given height & width, how to relocate a corner of a rectangle to a new place...)

Step 2. Pick your favorite programming language and implement the algorithms (Fun)

Step 3. Pick the UI Framework you like (.NET has an ecosystem), find out how to draw a rectangle using it using absolute layout, write glue codes which means finding out how to convert the result of your algorithm to draw the rectangle on screen

Step 4. Build your application

Step 5. Refactoring or changing your algorithm, or start over using another UI framework that you like better but you can keep the algorithms you wrote just rewrite the glue codes

[CommonLoon102]

Writing a proper text renderer with support of several fonts, ClearType, screen readers for the visually impaired, plus solving the issue of text flow and alignment itself would be a work for years. Good luck.

[CommonLoon102]

If you don't want to reinvent the wheel, use Skia: https://github.com/google/skia
Still, you don't have OS integration, then just use AvaloniaUI or platform.uno.
https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
https://platform.uno/