from the article

" Skylake users given 18 months to upgrade to Windows 10
And next generation processors, including Intel's Kaby Lake, won't be supported in old Windows
If you own a system with an Intel 6th generation Core processor—more memorably known as Skylake—and run Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you'll have to think about upgrading to Windows 10 within the next 18 months. Microsoft announced today that after July 17, 2017, only the "most critical" security fixes will be released for those platforms and those fixes will only be made available if they don't "risk the reliability or compatibility" of Windows 7 and 8.1 on other (non-Skylake) systems.

The full range of compatibility and security fixes will be published for non-Skylake machines for Windows 7 until January 14 2020, and for Windows 8.1 until January 10 2023.."

well thats nice
you can read the rest here http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skylake-users-given-18-months-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/

i cant help but feel that this is a huge middle finger to anybody who doesnt want to upgrade to windows 10

It seems they are trying to force everyone to upgrade. I wonder when Wine for Windows will appear. Also GOG for example will have to work a lot to fix the rest of the library to work on W10.

What does James Bond have to do with Windows?

Wow.. so they anticipated end of support by 3 years?
Can they do that? MS is really desperate about Win10.
Win7 works perfectly on Skylake (with a few tweaks).
I guess I'll just add some security fix after 2017..

Microsoft Force Awakens. :D

Calm your tits down. Again, the Internet tries to make of this a complete shit of FUD.

This means that after 18 months, drivers for hardware running older OSes won't be developed anymore. If you see, this trend has already started as companies are dropping complete support for Vista and 7 from their drivers portfolio. Microsoft does not guarantee

In addition, the how irrelevant 32-bit version is being dropped down left and right by devs. Like the newest Intel WiFi drivers, no 32-bit support on 8.1 and 10, and only legacy 32-bit support on 7.

Also, say you buy a new GPU in 2018. It would mean that it won't have driver support for Vista, 7, and 8. Only for 10. This will allow the GPU manufacturers to completely strip out legacy and crap code from their driver packages, improving much their driver reliability, features, and performance on the latest OS, assuming 10 will still be around by then.

It is good for everybody. If your shit works now, it will continue to work, there is no need for a picnic attack.

And that's exactly what people are afraid of. That they have to use the newest OS even if they don't want to. The fact that less choice is not a problem for you, just means that you don't get it.

To quote something:

You don't have to use the newest OS. You can still use Windows 95 if you want. But you can't expect that everyone still develops software for it! Windows 7 will be 9 years old in 2018 (and Windows 8 is a failed product without relevant market share)! Tell me, how many games are still being released for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 (9 years old consoles)? How many recent Apps can you run on the iPhone (the first - 8 years old)? How many websites work with the 9 years old Internet Explorer 7?

Microsoft will give W7 support until 2020 (iirc), but you can't force every company to pay employees to develop stuff for an antiquated system. If you want to stick with Windows 7, you don't need a high end CPU with the most recent drivers anyway. XP users don't need a GTX 980 Ti either ;)

The punchline is they will continue to support XP. :P

And I just got a Skylake in my PC last week! And now they're going to make me switch to Win10 from Linux Mint!? Crap.

What does this have to do with non-Windows OSes? People can't comprehend the amount of shit devs have to deal on a daily basis to have their newest innovations run on something that old.

this is FUD... stop tracking it all over... I have a 200 large catalog and I've tested it.. every game that worked in 7 works in 10...

Those with issues (older adventure some rare dos titles) were even more stable. Hell some ran better due to memory and process management improvements in 10.

GOG doesn't take this lightly or sitting down, but there are very certain conditions that need to exists for a game to not work in 10. Two of which is certain forms of DRM and specific code strings in the runtimes. And both GOG can/has fixed.

"Skylake users given 18 months to upgrade to Windows 10 "

I was being sarcastic and playing dumb, of course. But the first statement was a bit fear-mongerish (much like most news these days). Skylake users can keep doing what they are doing, for the most part.

Your first post and Acriz's posts are very important, I think. You don't have to switch. You'll still get the major updates for drivers if there are security risks until the end of Win7 and Win8 support. You just won't get the small tweaks for anything but the newest LGA1151 processors/mobos. Not a huge deal.

If you have your system running Win 7 right now, you'll be fine for the next 4-ish years. But if you have Win7 and you want to upgrade your hardware, you may need to switch.

All of that said, Linux FTW! :)