I have been programming Arduinos, ESP8266 and other platforms for years using the 1.8.16 program and was exited to learn about the new IDE V2.0.0. Sadly, it was designed to exclude the many in our community who have to, for sometimes financial reasons, use Windows 7.
Would it have been that hard to include the guy/gal that can't afford to upgrade due to system limitations or entire schools who still rely on Win 7? And I know there are many in my school district who still rely on Win 7.
Would it have been that hard to include all users and just not those that have the financial means to buy a new system that would run the new OS?
I'm sure there are reasons, but it would be nice if they could explain what they were.
Windows 7 is long out of support, and may just not be listed anymore. You can try to install 2.0 anyway, but I've read a number of issues with it, so I'm personally going to wait for another patch or so for it.
Yeah, go ahead and give it a try. Just because it is not supported does not mean it is necessarily incompatible. I don't know either way. But please keep in mind that the Arduino company does not provide support for the use of Arduino IDE 2.x on Windows 7, so if there are problems then it is up to the community to figure it out.
I do very much sympathize with your general sentiment, but you're playing the "you're excluding people" card a bit too hard. Arduino IDE 1.x will always be available and will still be just as excellent. Arduino remains accessible for Windows 7 users.
I got tired of paying for all the window upgrades and switched to Linux, that has saved me $$$ and a lot of time over the years. You can download it free and install it alongside your windows 7 and boot into linux or windows your choice at each boot. Note: Linux can read and write the windows file system but windows by design cannot read Linux files. This way you can use your existing files if you want.
Unfortunately gilshultz, it hasn't. I tried to load Linux on one of my old computers but it didn't work. I think the computer was likely past it's prime, The other computer is just as old so I gave up. No worries though. I'll just keep using IDE 1.8.16 as it works fine.
Besides, I've been busy working on a few projects. Just finished a second automated chicken coop door for a friend of mine. The first one is on our coop. My coop has a solar panel that charges a car battery to supply the power.
Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions. It's appreciated.
I had good luck making a very outdated laptop usable once more for basic operations (but not to the point of running more resource intensive applications like Arduino IDE 2.x) by installing this Linux distro:
I was actually surprised by how much bloat the distro included in terms of bundled applications I have no use for. I expected it to be very lightweight in that respect as well as in minimum system requirements and resource usage. I guess the idea is that they include a good collection of applications that are known to be suitable for use on the intended target systems, since if you try to use many of the standard alternative applications instead you will likely not have good results even though the distro itself works fine.