Ton, realize that we are used by schools both in the US and worldwide, and we are used in many poor countries. XP is still fairly widely used and provides supperior performance for Blender compared to Vista. Also, Windows 7 has only recently (September) passed XP in marketshare, and XP is still far ahead of Vista in marketshare, and Windows 8 marketshare is nonexistant.
"Windows 8 gained a solid 0.68 percentage points (from 0.41 percent to 1.09 percent) while Windows 7 gained just 0.02 percentage points (from 44.69 percent to 44.71 percent). Windows Vista meanwhile slipped 0.10 percentage points (from 5.80 percent to 5.70 percent) and Windows XP fell a huge 0.84 percentage points (from 40.66 percent to 39.82 percent)." http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/01/02/windows-gains-market-share-after-six-months-of-decline-windows-8-grabs-1-77-windows-7-passes-45/ Also 'light' and old workstations and laptops - while not well suited for heavy compositing, simulating, or rendering, work fine for most tasks including modeling, uv mapping, most texturing tasks, etc. Our userbase is primarily the modeling and uv mapping, with other tasks being far less common. It is fine to have recommended specs that are recent, even to have older specs not mentioned as supported, but it would be a very questionable move to actively prevent usage on older hardware and OSes. LetterRip _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
