Windows 2000: Do you think Second Life Should Stop Support for Windows 2000

[You can see the original post at http://status.secondlifegrid.net/2008/12/03/post367/ ]

Hi Everybody!!

In our effort to provide the highest quality Second Life experience possible we must occasionally make sure we are addressing the correct issues. It has come to our attention that we may be spending to much time and resources on a product no longer relevant to our residents.

Today we’d like to let you know we’re seriously considering whether Linden Lab should continue supporting Windows 2000. Our tracking shows that very few of you, about 1/10th of 1 percent of all of you that have logged in within the past two months, are still using Windows 2000 when logging into Second Life. That is approximately 2,000 out of 1,407,581 residents who have logged in to Second Life within the past 60 days.

We’d like to let the Linden engineers stop working on supporting an operating system released in 2000, and instead move on to other work which will benefit a much larger group of Residents.

If we do stop supporting that version of the OS, it would not be until 60 days from now, to make sure there is plenty of time for the news to spread.

To briefly review the last eight years of Windows OS: Windows 2000, was first released in February 2000, and updated with SP4 Rollup 1 v2 in 2005. Microsoft has followed Win2k with two more recent versions of the OS, Windows XP which was released in October 2001 and Windows Vista released in January 2007 and updated February 2008.

What would it mean to “stop support”? Eventually we would stop developing for the SDK (software development kit ) of that operating system, and we would also stop doing QA testing on Win2k. Also our support team would no longer be able to offer solutions to every issue related to or caused by the support of Windows 2000 ceasing.

What would you notice? If you are one of the few logging in with that OS, you would still be able to do so the day we stop supporting it for some time. Exactly how long we couldn’t guarantee, because we would no longer be testing and developing to make sure it does work.

What say you citizens? Thumbs up? Thumbs down?

Please direct any comments to *this forum thread!*

Lindens will be reading your comments and responding periodically *here in this thread* to your questions and suggestions over the next few days!

If it would help iron out the problems we're seeing in XP, Vista, Mac, and linux... Sure! (^_^)

I'm actually quite shocked to see that someone is still actually resorting to using Win2K on a machine graphically capable of running SL... I'd sooner assume they're using Shooped and that's part of the false information being sent out. (O.o)

It's open source, if some people want to continue fixing win2000 problems, then they are free to do so.

I say drop it.


Edit to add: This should probably be on the main blog, not the status blog that very few people read.

I would say keep it at least another year.

It's the most stable windows version around to use as fallback when everything else fails.

Sure it is getting close to drop it, but this isn't the time.

/me thinks this thread should have OPed with a poll. (^_^)y

/me cues the "can we get non-bot numbers" discussion.

You drop support and make things easier for yourself. In the meantime, unless future versions are drastically changed, they should still consider to function under the Wk2 API's.

You might even want to consider an end of life for XP support as well!

From what I've seen, running under 3 different O/S's (Ubuntu, XP & Vista) the LINUX builds are the MOST stable.

No. I think Second Life should be available to as many OS's and platforms that are available. Understandably, older OS's do not carry as many users as newer ones. Should LL pay to have staff on hand to help support windows 2000 users? Should LL pay to have their employees trained in how to use windows 2000 in order to offer support? No. Probably not, if there just aren't enough users.

Should SL still work on windows 2000? Yes, absolutely. Should there be support forums and perhaps a user based support network established that LL also supports? Yes.

This shouldn't even have to be asked at all. Mac OS 10.3.x (a 2004 product) was already discontinued. Why in the world would anyone ask if Windows 2000 should be supported and relevant. It's 2009 soon...

Enough additional time already wasted asking residents their opinions on this with a post.

Within the 2,000 that must be at least 3/4 bots running on older spare machines anyway...

Announce it, end official support, and move on please!

The OS is 8 years old now. Any machine running it is probably also running SL at a snails pace. I'd recommend dropping the support for it especially considering the percentile that has logged onto SL using Win2k. It's not worth the time & effort of the LL support staff.

My 10 cents worth of advice. Inflation, you know!

Agreed.

Drop support for Windows 2000 so you have more resources to fix the memory leak problem (one of the most important and never fixed problems)

The support for Win2k ends in 2005 from Microsoft, till 2010 you get security fixes only.


Windows 2000 isn't longer available. You can't buy it and there are no further needed updates to be a secure OS. The better way is to support recent OS. I'm sure it won't take a long time and newer versions from quicktime and graphic card driver don't support Windows 2000. Maybe you're happy with Windows 2000, I'm not and many other either. The next point, all Computers bought in the last 5 years (as minimum) have a pre installed Windows XP, since 2007 Windows Vista.

I would love to see a better support for recent OS and a much better multicore support.

I know a lot of people who have computers and none of them are running 2000. Microsoft has already stopped supporting 2000 and so I think that LL should stop supporting it too if only to dir4ect resources to other more worthwhile endeavours.

My immediate reaction to this--without much deep thought--is why are you asking most of us? Those of us who are using XP, OSX, Vista, etc., should have NO vote in whether 2000 is still supported.

Instead, I think you should post a poll which asks who's using Windows 2000. If the numbers turn out to be very small, then it's time to think about closing down support. Or perhaps you already know the number via tools you already have in place.

The only debate I see here as being in any way valid is what would constitute "very small".

Not exactly true.. See http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3071 - extended support goes until 2010.


XP was released in 2001..

Every system that can run win2k can run winXP too, so kick it and let the team get focus on XP, Vista or whatever! Perhaps it would be good to be albe to install a "SLIM" version on older computers to stay in touch if needed.

Honestly, why would you want to support an 8yrs-old OS? Concentrate on XP, Vista, Linux and MacOS! (In my case preferrably the latter)

You may have noticed that Linux and MacOS is increasingly popular _and_ up to date. XP has probably got the biggest market share at the moment (as people are reluctantly switching to Vista). And Vista, well, believe it or not (I cannot believe it *g*), is the Windows which is supposed to wear XP's shoes some day.

Save resources and focus on current OS rather than messing around with legacy stuff, please!

So basically, you're asking me if I want to continue to use Second Life. Right? Because I have Windows 2000, and do not/will not have any other OS until I upgrade to Linux in a couple years.

The age of the operating system has nothing to do with the age of the hardware. I am running Windows 2000 on a fairly modern machine (E6550, 7900GTO, 2GB DDR2 RAM).

There is very little core difference between Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It doesn't take alot of effort to support. If you want to cut off Windows 2000 support you might as well cut off Windows XP support, and hey, Linux is pretty old, cut off Linux support too why not.

Also, as mentioned before, Windows XP was released in 2001. XP is old too.

In short, no, I don't want 2000 support cut off.

(EDIT: Typo, mentioned XP date)

It seems reasonable to me.

/me votes no, though if it's really a ton of work for LL I might change that vote.

I just can't see saying "too bad - bye!" to 2000 people (2000 people!!!) who have logged in in the past 60 days. Not with premium subscriptions at their lowest level since early 2007 and the grid having shrunk by nearly 10% over the last month. This is trending the wrong way, IMO.

There might be little core difference to most users, but there are enough differences to cause developers headaches at times. I have to keep a Win2K box around for the sole purpose of ensuring that my XP-targeted code will work on it, and I am sometimes surprised and frustrated to find out that there is some fundamental difference that causes me to include 'special case' code in an otherwise clean codebase.

It's obviously not the age of the OS but the differences and special cases that are under consideration, and whether to keep maintaining compatibility that almost nobody actually needs.

I understand and appreciate your frustration, but even you have to admit that you are an edge case, right?

If I had a choice, I'd drop Win2K support entirely across my entire product line. The only reason that I haven't done so already is that I have a lot of government clients with ancient machines and too much red tape to go through to make it feasible. Even so, if it were only one-tenth of one percent of the client machines running Win2K, I'd drop support for it like a hot rock.

I work in a shop that still has dozens of W2K PCs. Whenever one of the W2K PCs stops working (usually due to a dead disk), we replace it with a PC loaded with XP SP3.

Would you like to know which PCs in our shop give us the most trouble?

The W2K PCs.

They're always crashing. They have all kinds of memory related crashes. You can't even install the latest Adobe Flash or Shockwave on them.

Windows XP is far more stable than W2K. When I had a PC with W2K on it, it used to crash (blue screen) at least once a week. Ever since I've been using XP (at home and at work), I think I've had a blue screen once in the past 5 years, and that was related to an improperly installed video card driver.

More and more vendors are dropping support for W2K.

If I had to develop and maintain the software for SL, I would want to stop supporting W2K.

It's not worth the effort, cost, and time for only 1/10th of 1 percent of the users.

Security fixes only, but no new features for the xmlrpc interpreter, directX, kernel and other necessary details. Full support ends in 2005

You're right, but full support runs till april 2009 and extended support till 2012. So XP is more recent then Windows 2000 (a really outdated OS).

While it makes sense to drop support for Windows 2000, it really depends on how much effort is spent on developing for the OS in the first place.

Say, (and we're just gonna pretend here) that out of all the available OS's developing/support for Windows 2000 takes up 1/5-1/6 of all development/support. In this instance, it's definitely a waste of resources that could be used elsewhere.

HOWEVER, if it doesn't take much to support Win2000 from content created for XP or Vista, I think that it is best to keep supporting Windows 2000.

Basically, if there's a significant amount to be gained from stopping support, then stop it, but if the difference isn't much, then it shouldn't be stopped.

Even though 1/100th of a percent use Windows 2000, by stopping support you are cutting off a working SL for some of your customers.