Hah, yea. I had to go through the process of installing windows in a Virtual Machine and passing the USB connection through(I’m a Linux user). Was kind of a hassle but ended up working okay(was worried about bricking it).

But dang: Monthly security updates and a much better and faster UI.

Running Pixel Experience with Android 13 on my Xiaomi Redmi note 10 pro. Very smooth sailing.

Even if steam as a client would continue to work on older versions of Windows, AMD and NVIDIA do not support any of their drivers anymore (For 7, 8 ,8.1). Furthermore, you will run into compatibility problems in the long run. Games that are being released now or were during the last couple of years are written for more recent versions of windows and may use API’s or technology that is not available on older versions of Windows.

In addition to that, using the above mentioned versions of windows is a questionable in another way: Security! Windows 7 and 8/8.1 are EOL and doesn’t receive any security updates (at least to consumers) anymore.

Windows 8 / 8.1 wasn’t even a good platform to settle on in the first place. It wasn’t widly adopted and therefore received bad support from major hardware producers and software companies.

PS: I don’t think Windows 8.1 was a bad OS, it just tied to do so many things at once or maybe was just to early for it’s time?