In comp.os.linux.misc Mike Scott wrote:
On 28/12/2018 22:31, Nomen Nescio wrote:
...
*I will not go beyond Windows 7.* ....


Unfortunately, some organizations seem to think they don't need to
support anything else.

This is all too true.

Two come instantly to mind that cause me some grief. Supply your own
company names :-)

Car GPS unit updates require windows - they don't even support vista
now.

TomTom is one. Their 'updater', which did seemingly nothing beyond
know how to log into their systems, download files, and store files on
the unit (the unit appeared as a thumb drive when attached), was
windows only.

But, a bit over two years ago now they also decided that my unit was
too old to get any more updates, and removed all support for further
updating it.

At which point I switched to OsmAnd https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/
for car GPS needs.

Fortunately I have an old laptop that sits in the cupboard, but
its time is running out.

TomTom's 'updater' began life running on WinXP. At some point they
'upgraded' something and it then needed a minimum of Win7. I'd not be
surprised that their newest version needed Win10 now.

I strongly suspect there's a breed of programmer that's too lazy (or
just too incompetent) to abstract out the OS interface from their
code.

It is likely more that corporate management does not see any value in
instructing their contract programmers to abstract out the OS interface
from the code. They (management) see MSWin (and sometimes MacOS, but
not always) as the only alternatives they need to spend money
supporting and the programmers are never tasked with supporting
anything else.

But there seems nothing the user can do -- there are no alternatives to
those suppliers.

For at least car GPS purposes there is OsmAnd [1], and it has the benefit
of being driven from OpenStreetMap data so if you do find an issue, you
can quickly just fix it yourself and the next monthly map update for
OsmAnd will usually contain the fix (if the fix was made before their
cutoff for generating new map data files).

[1] There are a few others as well that are driven off of OpenStreetMap
data.