Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Here is the original proposal: Proposal: Drop Win98 support with OOo 3.0 release, posted last week (11 Feb).

Since the proposal message was cross-posted to several mailing lists, the follow-up discussion is a big mess, but you can wade through it if you're sufficiently interested: Search OOo mailing lists for "drop Win98 support".

The upshot is that it costs a lot of time and effort to support Win98/ME, and even with that effort the support is not as good as for the other platforms. MS is not updating 98/ME, so OOo has to emulate new OS features and work around bugs that are fixed in newer Windows.

Once OOo 3 is released (September 2008), the choices for those using OOo on Win98/ME will be (by my limited understanding):

• Upgrade to a newer Windows (that pretty much means Vista and new hardware), or
• Upgrade to a different OS (Linux or Mac), or
• Continue to use OOo 2.4 and accept minimal support

I asked what the support policy would be for 2.4, but got no response. I would expect that it will receive minimal fixes (critical bugs and security fixes) for a while, but probably more more than six months to one year after 3.0 comes out. Maybe someone here knows more.

Seems reasonable. If it really costs them that much effort to support those two OSs it's not really worth it for the tiny (and shrinking) group using them.
After all, there are so many other things with this program that need fixing.

And by dropping support for Windows 98 and Windows ME, hopefully the developer can optimise the code thus reducing the download file size and most importantly improve the startup time of launching the application.

Many applications dropped 9x support years ago so it's seems fair enough for OOo to finally drop it now. I know the moment OOo 3.0 comes out there will be posts demanding support again. I'm sure some people will make the argument that they don't want to have to buy new hardware to run a new version of OOo on. There are plenty of versions of Linux for older hardware so there is always a non-Windows route available.

EdH wrote:There are plenty of versions of Linux for older hardware so there is always a non-Windows route available.

Except many niche apps don't run on Linux.

Continue to use OOo 2.4 and accept minimal support

It's not going to be a huge deal because
1. There are few Windows 9x users left
2. They are used to other applications sunsetting support for Windows 9x. This encourages the users to make a change.
3. OpenOffice.org 2.4 is still readily available for free
4. OpenOffice.org file formats will change little. The ODF is evolving a bit, but there are no radical changes in sight.

I would expect that it will receive minimal fixes (critical bugs and security fixes) for a while, but probably more more than six months to one year after 3.0 comes out. Maybe someone here knows more.

I expect no support. Once OpenOffice.org 2.0 came out, there were no releases of the version 1 line. I did see a note that there were OOo version 1 code contributions even recently, but that means nothing to end users who only care about binary releases.

I thought there continued to be critical fixes released for 1.x and 2.0.x for a while--i.e., there were some releases maintained as "stable" for a longer period, but not "forever."

OpenOffice.org file formats will change little. The ODF is evolving a bit, but there are no radical changes in sight.

Again, I thought that OOo 3 was going to break backward file compatibility by going to ODF 1.2 (but I could be wrong, or misunderstanding what that means).

acknak wrote:I thought there continued to be critical fixes released for 1.x and 2.0.x for a while--i.e., there were some releases maintained as "stable" for a longer period, but not "forever."

Here are the release dates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History

The only version 1.x release after 2.0 came out was the 1.1.5 security patch. It wasn't even a full release. It was just a patch that the majority of people would struggle to apply.

Again, I thought that OOo 3 was going to break backward file compatibility by going to ODF 1.2 (but I could be wrong, or misunderstanding what that means).

Some of the new Chart stuff in OpenOffice.org 2.4 is ODF 1.1 or 1.2 (I forget), but it's a newer ODF than OpenOffice.org 2.3.1. If you take a document with newer features and go back, you just lose the new features and not the whole document.

IIRC, one of the new features in OOo 2.4 is a warning (not an error) when you open a newer ODF. IIRC, this is similar to the way Acrobat Reader treats PDF.

If removing Win98/ME support reduce size of files and speed up the start and interaction of OpenOffice, they should do it! Only few people use these operating systems. OpenOffice 2 doesn't work fast on slow machines. If you can run OOo, your computer should work with installed Win 2000 / XP. Consider alternative choice too - Linux, BSD, MacOS...

The hugest problem of OOo is slow startup and performance. I hope they will be fixed in OOo 3. Don't bother by supporting Win 9x.

I was thinking about adding OOo 2.4 to my Windows 98 machine (Since that's the last version for 98) but I need to know if it works. If support is ending does that mean it isn't complete or can I download it and be happy?

Install current version 2.4.1 and be happy with this particular version. Next version will be 3.0. All 2.X versions won't get any bugfixes nor features anymore.