Release Candidate and Windows 8 Pro

• Oct 27, 2019 - 11:21

I'm unable to run Release Candidate on Windows 8 Pro. Do I need to enable something in order to do so?

I look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible. Thank you for a generally superb software which I've used for years.

Recently downgraded to Windows 8 as Windows 10 has given too much problems in other software.

Kind regards
Di

Comments

• Oct 29, 2019 - 02:47

Very few developers are still developing or testing on Windows 8. Far from giving fewer problems, it will almost surely have more and more problems over time. I suspect any problems you were having were just coincidence - that is, it's not very likely there are any modern programs that actually work better on Windows 8 than 10 overall. yu might just have happened to hit a bug in the program when using Windows 10, but chances are the same bug - plus more - will exist when using Windows 8.

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• Oct 29, 2019 - 14:00

Al;l the more reason not to try to do something unusual / non-standard like try to force programs to run on obsolete versions of an OS. Your best chance of success always comes from using defaults and not trying to do something unusual that the developers didn't expect and thus didn't test as well.

So, you say you are "unable to run" the release candidate - what do you mean, specifically? At what stage of the process does it fail, and what exactly goes wrong? Did you successfully download it? Install it? Did you get a program icon? Do you get an error message at some point?

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• Oct 29, 2019 - 14:25

Well, it's not officially "unsupported" by Microsoft yet, but it's definitely "obsolete" in that it was replaced many years ago (by Windows 10) and no longer receives much development effort from Microsoft or from other software vendors. So it's almost certainly likely to cause more compatibility issues with modern software that was specifically developed on & for Windows 10 than a modern OS would.

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• Oct 29, 2019 - 14:27

It should not, not at all. MuseScore 3 is supported on MuseScore 7 and later, and probably will even after Windows 7 runs out of support, as long as we don't change the Qt version (which basically caused Windows XP to no longer be supported by MuseScore 3, as it was for MuseScore 2)

I've even seen the recomendation to upate Windows 7 to 8, to continue receiving Microsoft fixes after the end of this year, in cases where Windows 10 would be too demanding for the current hardware.

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• Oct 29, 2019 - 14:41

"Supported on" doesn't mean the same as "tested most thoroughly and runs best on". There are far more users and far more developers on Windows 10 than Windows 8 (not just for MuseScore, but for pretty much any modern application), so any OS-dependent problems are more likely to have already been encountered, reported, and fixed.

This is not to say there is no reason for anyone to ever use Windows 8. Certainly if you have older hardware that was never intended for Windows 10 to begin with, you may encounter problems. Or maybe you have specialized Windows 8 sysadmin experience that would require a learning curve to update etc. Plenty of valid reasons can exist to remain on Windows 8 if that is where your system, already is. I'm just saying, all else being equal, it's a mistake to assume one will experience fewer compatibility issues in modern software with Windows 8 than Windows 10 - quite the opposite is likely to be true.

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• Oct 29, 2019 - 15:06

It's true that Windows 7 was more limited than Windows 10 and thus "simpler" in that sense. And in particular, Windows 10 does indeed have a very nice automatic update feature that Windows 7 lacks. So while Windows 10 doesn't need updates any more than Windows 7, it's much more likely to actually get the updates that are made available. And of course, updates are essentially not going to be made available for Windows 7 anymore, so you definitely open yourself up to considerable risk staying on it. But that's a separate discussion not really relevant to MuseScore.

So, back to the actual subject at hand, again, if you own older hardware designed for Windows 7 or 8, then yes, of course, it is best to remain there. Not because any particular application is likely to run better on on older OS (the opposite is true), but because your particular hardware will likely run best on the OS it was designed for, absolutely. If on the other hand your system was designed from the beginning for Windows 10, chances are you are inviting trouble by attempting to install an older OS on it - that OS would likely never have been tested on that hardware. So if the hardware was designed for Windows 10, and you are experiencing problems after attempting to install Windows 8 on it, that would not be the least bit surprising to me. You will always be best off with the OS your hardware was actually designed for, whether that Windows 7, 8, or 10.

Assuming then your computer really is designed to run Windows 8, then, I would certainly expect MuseScore to run on it. So again, what specifically goes wrong when you try to run MuseScore 3.3 RC?

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• Oct 29, 2019 - 15:18

So it most probably is a 32bit Windows and you try to install a 64bit MuseScore on it I guess, that won't work, not with any 32bit Windows, you'd need to download and install the 32bit version. That in turn doesn't (yet) exists for 3.3 (Beta, RC, development build)

Edit: 32bit builds for 3.3 Beta and RC do exist, check https://musescore.org/en/3.3rc3 and pick the 2nd from the left, not the first

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