What about giving a try to gaming on your KUbuntu? ;)
https://www.gog.com/mix/playit_for_debian_gamers_and_their_ubuntu_friends

I see... such is OS upgrades. It's good they are keeping support. I also hope there's still SOME way of changing the OS's "default" MIDI device. I've got a method that works fine for Windows 7, but it's a bit of a kludge. I can only hope they've brought back the control panel option to do so this time around.

As for things like Creative's sound cards... It seems like they as a company have basically decided they make speakers and shoddy MP3 players for old people who've never heard of iPods now. They still occasionally release new sound cards, but for example they dropped MIDI support from their latest cards (which is.... I can't even imagine how they think that's a good idea). I think they still support their older X-Fi cards just enough to bother with updating the driver for it, but I don't think they'll bother past that. I can't at all be sure that they'll bother updating their Creative Alchemy service, so that's up in the air too at this point. All told, it'll be a pain trying to set up a system that can play ALL my old games with all the features they originally had.

Have you tried running it in a virtual machine?

I can paste step-by-step instructions for setting up a VirtualBox VM using Linux+Wine VM which boots straight into the game if you don't have an older Windows install disc kicking around. (Icewind Dale 2 is listed as Platinum compatibility in the WineHQ AppDB and PlayOnLinux has a setup script for it.)

Did they drop MIDI support on all hardware, or just on Grandma's solitaire machine hardware? They used to make low end amateur music recording hardware that had MIDI connect capabilities, did they kill that off? Audigy I think it was called but I'd have to web search it.

I just can't see any rational reason for Microsoft to drop MIDI support from Windows. Not support for connecting MIDI hardware to a MIDI interface anyway. Perhaps the crappy built in MIDI synthesizer used to play .mid control files in Windows Media Player perhaps, but that was always pretty terrible anyway.

The Mac may dominate for DAW applications in professional music studios, but Windows is still popular for doing the same for many musicians that use Windows as their primary desktop platform (such as myself), and MIDI is a defacto standard just as widely used today as it ever has been in the past. I just can't see Microsoft completely gutting support for it out of their operating system. Every synthesizer or other music keyboard, just about every rack mount effects unit, many amplifiers and hell just about every piece of music gear has MIDI capability and is widely used. Not to mention that HD-MIDI has been in the works for many years now and will hopefully be on the market in the next year or two. MIDI is used more today than it ever was anytime previous to this and will only continue to grow in the future as more and more music hardware becomes computerized.

What is sometimes funny, is that when musicians have discussions like this online in forums where non-musicians or musicians that don't understand MIDI might be participating, what I find happens 9 times out of 10 is some people will laugh at MIDI and think it is some archaic music file format used to play crappy music because they remember listening to crappy MIDI music files from video games or whatever back in the 90s and have associated "MIDI == .mid files == crappy 90's era video game music" in their minds and think "nobody uses that anymore, why would anyone want to" but whom don't actually have any idea what MIDI actually is or how it's used. Granted it is even a super archaic hardware format these days too, but it is the one and only standard way to interconnect music hardware control signals so it is definitely technology that is mandatory for any system that wants to be able to work as a DAW or any other kind of professional or even amateur music recording.

I will truly be shocked if Microsoft removes support from the OS, but at the same time I'm sure an open source solution would be dropped right in it's place by anyone who cares and needs it.

My laptop came with Windows 8 and no midi support. Quickly fixed with installing something like VirtualMidiSynth and a soundfont, and hey, setting up DOSBox games to use General Midi and having a good midi soundbank loaded can sound really good if you're not after the nostalgia factor. And even then a soundbank can do a good deal, playing Duke 3D with the music sounding like a NES just somehow feels wrong though

For that matter I installed VMS on my Vista as well, but that was because I wanted to play Synthesia, and it's rather distracting to have half a second lag between you press a keyboard key and you hear any sound.

So yeah, MIDI out of the box would be nice to have, but I'm not sure it'll be there.

I have this: http://www.m-audio.com/products/view/oxygen-49

It works perfectly with 7, 8, 8.1, and 10.
They modified the audio stack specifically to improve the performance for music creators. I doubt they are going to remove support for the tools that those musicians have.
I think we're talking about two completely different "MIDI" things here.

Ah, so the OS is not providing a MIDI Synthesizer anymore then, that's a big difference than it not supporting MIDI at all. :)
Yeah, I'd expect them to make improvements to audio support and not go the other direction. I can see some rationale for dropping a software MIDI Synth from the OS or making it an optional download or something as the majority of users wont ever use such a thing at all nowadays and very little new software needs a software MIDI synth, and the Windows Synth was never that great to begin with.

As long as they don't affect the important stuff such as hardware driver support for MIDI on sound cards or standalone boards presumably. Even though I wont be using it, it's good to hear they've improved audio latency. WDM was ok but audio latency can always be improved on any OS and is never good enough. :) Do you know if they're including ASIO drivers now by default or have they done their own thing again?

I use Roland ASIO drivers for one of my devices and ASIO4ALL open source drivers for all other audio hardware for pro recording on Windows 7. Not perfect but works quite well.

No idea. They had a one hour session about the changes to the audio stack on Channel9, but I just skimmed through it as it was in Chinese.

https://channel9.msdn.com/events/WinHEC/2015/WHT202 If you want to torture yourself.

Then you should at least steal a better sense of humor, Garrett. =p

Well I'm staying with
XP. And if Gog drops XP then I will have to play games the old way. Games made in XP days should support XP.

I feel the same way. Microsoft wants to forced people to leave a OS they like using. XP is fine for me.
That's how I feel. I like XP a lot. After all the games are old. So XP should matter. But I think GOG really wants to be modern and get all the latest games. Because soon they'll run out of old games. But new games aren't all that really. GamersGate has a nice selection of games. If only they came in file form like GOG. They have hidden object games. I like them. And I like all the old games too. Not so much the trashy games they make now.

Been using XP since it came out. No issues what so ever. I have no ideas what others are doing on their computers or why they have issues on XP but all is fine here. I play my games just fine, internet is good and I even develop/write software on it. Quite frankly, all operating systems are vulnerable. Nothing is secure in this world.

Yep. Just use Avast anti virus and get an ad blocker plugin for Firefox. Windows 8 is no safer than Windows 98. Just don't go to strange websites and only open or view text emails. Unless you know it's coming from someone you trust. I've been using computers for a long time now. If the new OS offers features you don't need or want... There's no reason to upgrade. It's not like your pc is going to stop working. Not the OS anyway. Hard drives and so forth is a different story.