Win2k Support Cancellation
Back in early December, we blogged to let you know that we were seriously considering whether Linden Lab should continue supporting the Windows 2000 operating system.
As we wrote then, our tracking shows that very few of you (about 1/10 of 1 percent of our current active Residents) are still using Windows 2000 when logging into Second Life.
The vast majority of responses from you confirmed that you agree, it makes sense to free up the Linden engineers from working to support an operating system used by so few Residents, and instead we should let them move on to other work which will benefit a much larger group. The smaller group that had their concerns about their favorite operating system was relieved to know that even though we will discontinue support of Windows 2000, we are not opposed to taking patches that help platforms we do not support.
We wanted to make sure there was plenty of time for the news to spread, and now two months later, it’s time to actually cease support of this relatively little-used OS.
What does it mean to “stop support”? Basically, it means we stop new development for the SDK (software development kit) of that operating system, and also stop doing QA testing on Win2k.
What will you notice? If you are one of the few logging in with Windows 2000, you can still do so today, even though we are officially now not supporting it — and that may be true for some time.
Exactly how long we can’t guarantee, because Linden engineers will no longer be testing to make sure that new releases will work with Windows 2000. So, eventually, there may be a time when some new element will interfere significantly enough to result in folks who will not be able to log in with Win2k on their hardware. At that time such folks may need to upgrade their OS in order to do run SL.
We thank you for your input during that last forum, if you would like to respond to this post please go here.