I still run XP on some machines at home, so it's not that unusual to still be using it. (Although I recently did buy a new toaster and stopped using XP there.) But seriously, I use some old computers for minor supporting tasks in my job and they are early 2000's machines who can't handle anything more than their simple purpose in life but still run well with XP and could run 90's or older games with no problem.

I think that if this is an issue that doesn't touch you, you don't need to come here to tell people to upgrade their systems and stop asking for support. There is nothing wrong with asking for the possibility of having support for older games on older OS systems. I think that asking for support of newer games on older systems is problematic though, and something I would not expect to be available.

What's next? Ask GoG to patch Window XP should the hack break something?

The thing is that people are complaining about new software (Galaxy) for not support a very old OS (WinXP). If you want to play old games on a WinXP machine you still can. You can download the installer like always.

I think the best approach is to ask GOG to make Galaxy Open Source or at least to publish the protocol specification. That way a community alternatives (like LGOGDownloader) can be made to support older OSs, for example.

Or like I said before switch to other OS (Linux, BSD, etc.) which can run fine on legacy hardware.

I didn't want to be rude, I am sorry.

Since Microsoft themselves won't update Windows XP anymore, I believe that security breaches won't be corrected in the foreseen future, so for a computer which uses Windows XP for a online use, it could be dangerous for the user.

I never said previously that people should stop using Windows XP when discussions appeared right after Microsoft announced ending support. Because I believe that computers can work fine, but to avoid malwares, for a full offline use now.

But, here we are discussing about GOG Galaxy, an online software. That's why I thought that for that use, maybe Windows XP is too old and not supported by their own developpers anymore. Nothing wrong to download with another OS to play with Windows XP for instance.

I am disappointed but unsurprised to find a lot of fanboys defending not officially supporting Windows XP, but as a programmer I have to say, it's utterly trivial to make software that runs on 7 run on XP. Really not a challenge... I will admit GOG Downloader definitely showed me software engineering is a serious weak point at GOG and always has been.

As for 'security', if MSIE isn't going to be patched run Firefox. Ain't rocket science. The end of support is to encourage people to buy a newer version, because that's how Microsoft makes their money.

This could definitely be interesting. However GOG may not be so keen on giving up control over their network. I guess we have to see how they respond to this.

They don't have to give up any control. They will allways have the control. The only thing is that people can see the code and pull requests and fixes, but GOG will decide what they accept. Also they have said that won't be against community alternatives.

According to this pie chart for November 2015:

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0

[Desktop share]
Windows 7 is 56%

XP is about 11% (still as popular as Windows 8.1 and beats Windows 10)

Windows 8.1 is 11%
Windows 10 is 9%
MAC OS X 10 is 5% combined
Windows 8 is 3%

This shows the undying popularity of Windows XP even after 14 years nearing 15 soon.
There is so much hardware that supports XP and a huge software library.

IF anything GOG Galaxy should support at the minimum these two OSes:

XP SP3 32-bit - The last and best 32-bit Windows OS released.

and

Vista SP2 DX11.0 64-bit which is essentially the same Windows 7 SP1 but faster and all code written for Vista should work on W7 and later.


Grandfathering support for all their current games and also if they wish to modify some of their older games and add multiplayer online support this would be a good way to make more sales and push people to try out Gog Galaxy even on XP. Not everyone is going to jump to Windows 7 or 10 just because it is newer and most XP games are incompatible to run on Vista and later.

If you check out this pie chart:
https://netmarketshare.com/

Firefox is at 12% which is what most XP users use as a browser since IE is vulnerable and outdated.
Google Chrome at 31% is also supported on XP.
This puts a possible 43% range of people who could be using these two browsers with XP.

Most people using IE are probably using Windows Vista and later since new versions of IE don't work on XP.

I would rather GOG spend their development resources on something other than supporting a long-dead OS. For instance it would be awesome if the saved game files were kept in the could, so that one could pick up at the same spot regardless of the computer on which one logged into Galaxy from.

The idea of saved games files kept in the cloud wouldn't make sense. These files are tiny. Let's say GOG's cloud servers went down then you couldn't resume where you left off or say the saved game data was destroyed / corrupted since it was all kept in the Gog cloud and not locally on your computer.

This kind of thinking would be more useful when dealing with Java or web based games not stand alone games running on the computer's operating system. You'll still have to deal with downloading and installing the game on another computer. You could easily just locate the saved game file yourself and upload it to your email account as an attachment if you knew you were going somewhere else and might decide to redownload the game off GOG and play it on another computer.

But evaluating your idea of a long dead OS.

Let's put this into perspective.
XP 32-bit takes 20% and Windows 7 takes 80% if you compare just these two OSes.

One OS dominates the 32 bit realm and the other the 64 bit realm.

November 2015 Desktop usage stats for all OS:
W7 57%
XP 14%

If you combined Linux, Vista, and MAC OS X versions they all total 10.25% which is way below XP's share.

Should we consider all these other operating system dead since they fall below XP's popularity unworthy of GOG's resources?

Linux barely hits 2% and the top two MAC OS X's combined approach 5%. I think if XP drops to 1% it would be a fair statement to make.

Linux and MAC OS X are still supported even though they constitute a very small percentage of people actually using these operating systems.



[Other OS breakdown]
Linux 1.62%

Windows Vista 1.61%
Windows NT 4.0- 0.04%

[MAC OS X combined roughly 7%, 6.98%]
Mac OS X 10.11 2.66%
Mac OS X 10.10 2.45%
Mac OS X 10.9 0.86%
Mac OS X 10.6 0.35%
Mac OS X 10.8 0.29%
Mac OS X 10.7 0.29%
Mac OS X 10.5 0.06%
Mac OS X 10.4 0.02%



[Desktop OS usage timeline from 2007-2015]
XP vs W7 vs Vista

[Vista released]
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2007&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=Y
2007
XP 83%
W7 0%
VS 8%


https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2008&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=Y
2008
XP 80%
W7 0%
VS 11%


[W7 introduced]
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2009&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=Y
2009
XP 73%
W7 1%
VS 18%


https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2010&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=Y
2010
XP 63%
W7 14%
VS 15%


https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2011&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=Y
2011
XP 54%
W7 29%
VS 10%


https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2012&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=Y
2012
XP 44%
W7 41%
VS 7%


https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2013&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=Y
2013
XP 35%
W7 45%
VS 4%


https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2014&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=Y
2014
XP 24%
W7 51%
VS 3%


https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2015&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=Y
2015
XP 14%
W7 57%
VS 2%




Interesting as I was analyzing the Pie Charts for the last 8 years.

XP was dominating in 2010-2012 and began a slow 9% decline per year since.

XP always dominated over Vista during its entire life cycle.

W7 has had an annual growth from 2010-2015 (15%, 12%, 4%, 6%, 6%).

The growth has stabilized the last few years and may level off soon.

You are aware that by "Keep the saves in the cloud" we mean keeping a copy of them there, and if there's a discrepancy, ask us which one to keep, right? So if you are offline, you continue with your local files, while if you are online and the files date is different, you are asked if you want to use the local ones or download the ones from the cloud.
If there are cloud files and no local, cloud ones are downloaded, if there are local and no cloud, at the end of the session, they are uploaded. Do add a better check than date if you wish to counter possible corruption.

P.S. While I don't doubt netmarketshare's stats (don't really want to check what machines they count in their data), I know for a fact that quite a ton of machines that are not used for games but are on the internet are stuck with older OSes. For gaming media, a better estimate would be Steam's Hardware & Software Survey, though that only takes into account users of Steam, so the Linux percentage is quite smaller than the Linux machines in use, even discounting the fact that many Linux gamers do not game on Steam. From those stats, Windows XP share is an order of magnitude less than Windows 8 share, and 20 times less than the Windows 7 share.

So while XP may still be in use by 1 in every 10 machines (really? Linux only has a 1.62% share? That by itself makes me question the data), not all of those machines are used to game.

Excellent explanation of how cloud saves should work. To me it was self-evident, but I guess not to all.

As to the OS market share, the vast overwhelming majority of those ancient computers running extinct OSs are not only not used for gaming, they are not even personal computers strictly speaking. What happens is that businesses have an enormous amount of various computers set up to do different tasks. The software is written and it works. Companies don't want to invest into developing a new one, so tons of machines still run MS-DOS even. I've seem quite a few myself. The thing is, more often than not, users don't even log in to these computers. They are just buzzing away somewhere and nobody remembers them until they break, in which case they just get replaced, the same old OS gets installed and they keep going.

Counting them for our purposes is ... absurd.

Not for long...

http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/10/google-will-stop-supporting-chrome-for-windows-xp-vista-and-older-versions-of-os-x-by-april-2016/

GOG should make a version of Galaxy for CP/M-88. Or OS/360.

The amount of retardation in the suggestion is off the chart.