windows 7 use - come on

[lqbbusse]

It is very hard to believe there is no version of Fusion 360 that can be downloaded to work on Windows 7.  I design little projects for myself on the non-commercial license and don't want to upgrade my entire system for one program.  No different than I do not need to upgrade for other software that I can use older versions on windows 7 just fine.  Now my projects are basically lost.

[seth.madore]

Win7 support was retired from Microsoft itself (for most users) over a decade ago and all support in 2020. We can only support testing on a finite range of operating systems, so at some point we have to say "these are what we support". Your projects aren't lost, they are still available to you when you login to Fusion from any computer with a supported operating system, and they are still available from your A360 dashboard.

[lqbbusse]

I have a banking program that is 30 years old.  The company doesn't support it and hasn't for years, but they also didn't turn of the program either forcing me to upgrade my system to use a new program.  Why turn off a program?  Stop supporting it sure, but it is still useful to many as is.  For all intents and purposes my projects are lost because I just can't log in with another computer to use them.

[lance.carocci]

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Why turn off a program?  

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We support a given release generally up to 6 months - and this is more for educators and enterprise labs which may be unable to push regular monthly updates and hotfixes. Even without "support," we also continue to allow old clients to connect beyond that, as long as feasibly possible.

We allowed new releases of Fusion to continue running on Win 7 and 8 long after formal support was dropped for those versions, but the door finally closed when issues could not be reproduced on 10 and 11. Much of Fusion's service infrastructure and data model have changed in that time - there is simply no way to make older clients from that era aware of the changes and upgrades we have made since then.

Fusion is designed as cloud software, first and foremost. If your application gets too far out of date, it can't connect to our servers once they get updated to newer endpoints, APIs, and security protocols, which means it cannot sync your data or license info.

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While we're on the topic, the door is closing on Windows 10, too. There will be a point where app updates require 11 or newer, and sometime thereafter those un-updatable apps will cease to function. For this reason, we remind users in-app well in advance of ending support and update eligibility to give them adequate time to plan and budget for device upgrades.

[lqbbusse]

The only notification I got was when I went to use the program and it didn't work and didn't update so I went on the hunt for what was wrong.  Is that your definition of advanced notice?  Pretty sad if it was.  No emails either.  That wasn't helpful.  Doesn't matter now.  I'll have to switch to a full cloud based program and kiss fusion to the curb along with my projects.

[beananimal]

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@lance.carocci wrote:

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Why turn off a program?  

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We support a given release generally up to 6 months - and this is more for educators and enterprise labs which may be unable to push regular monthly updates and hotfixes. Even without "support," we also continue to allow old clients to connect beyond that, as long as feasibly possible.

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Not arguing for Windows 7 support, but in what reality do you think "6 months" is time for "educators" and "enterprise" to adopt core software updates?

[lance.carocci]

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@beananimal wrote:

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Not arguing for Windows 7 support, but in what reality do you think "6 months" is time for "educators" and "enterprise" to adopt core software updates?

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The same one where I envision my Barbie Dreamhouse 🤓

No, but for real, we're aware it's too short for some - the 6 month timeline isn't a hard cutoff for updating though, it's just the soft cutoff after which, should you come to support with a problem, the first thing they're going to do is require an update to a newer version to rule out potential legacy API issues.

The hard cutoff from services timeline is generally several times longer, and is foreshadowed by a very scary, red banner message to give ample heads-up.

[beananimal]

Thank you for the response. With W10 being EOS 10/25 - this will be interesting to watch. As with W7, the holdouts were plenty due to how bad W10 was at so many things. I assume there are going to be fewer W10 holdouts given that W11 is pretty much the same.

[lance.carocci]

Some context that might help here is that Fusion makes a differentiation between end of support and end of life (better known as client blocking).

When something is end of support, it generally means that our data suggests that usage patterns have dropped low enough that it isn't a good use of resources to validate or develop around. But if it still works, hey, we're not going to stop you.

That's the limbo Windows 7/8.1 were in for a while before being blocked, and that's where Windows 10 is headed, too. Compared to macOS updates, Windows API changes and legacy DLL support is robust (almost to a fault because users are slower to uptake new major releases), and that allows us to keep the app running a bit longer.