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Why? I Mean I know why. But those drivers take up like zero space. It's such a fuck you consume move is laughable. That's all the innovative things coming out of America these days. Remove features and quality, then charge more.
Its about selling something new that has a more limited life.
A massive reason must be the security concerns with them, with no upkeep from the manufacturer. And since they aren't open source (some of the sources are probably lost by now) no-one else can fix the problems. These old drivers are essentially like backdoors into your system. You actually don't want to have them around.
This is why Linux and other open source software is the only right way. Plug these old devices into Linux, they probably just work due to some hero reverse-engineering them.
We should only buy hardware that has open source drivers. Eventually, the companies should be forced to deliver sources, at least after support ends, and this should be enforced with right to repair style laws.
I wonder if the plumbing required to keep them working is problematic somehow.
My guess would be they're refactoring or removing a dependency or changing a security model that would require them to update legacy driver code and rather than do that, they're just sun-setting that stuff.
Microsoft would need some advantage to even touch it enough to remove it, risk is still risk. And they're not exactly in the business of selling much hardware these days. If it were cheaper and less problematic to leave it alone, they would have left it alone, that's how it's been there for decades.
No. For those to become problematic Microsoft would have had to change core software to their OS. (that's the problem with MSWindows, it's only been added to for the past 50 years.) if Microsoft was smart they pups invest in a completely new OS. But that cost actually investing in human programmers. But no. They keep milking their outdated code for everything and will slap Ai on it and call it new.)
They haven’t changed the plumbing for printers since Vista, the changes they made then are part of why it took until 7 for things to work correctly.
Vista doesn't throw the baby out with the bath water. It made a minor communication change between drivers, cpu, and software. They went right back to the old system post vista.