Do a lot of OpenMPT users actually use Windows 11?

[minebrandon]

I was reading the https://forum.openmpt.org/index.php?topic=6188.0 forum about Windows support, and in the newest versions I see Windows 10 marked as legacy with 11 on the "normal" version. Which makes me wonder, are seriously that many OpenMPT users using Windows 11 to make the shift, or is it just that that whole October 2025 end of support and OpenMPT 1.33 will come out after that?

[manx]

I was reading the https://forum.openmpt.org/index.php?topic=6188.0 forum about Windows support, and in the newest versions I see Windows 10 marked as legacy with 11 on the "normal" version. Which makes me wonder, are seriously that many OpenMPT users using Windows 11 to make the shift, or is it just that that whole October 2025 end of support and OpenMPT 1.33 will come out after that?

We provide public statistics about our user's system configurations at https://buildbot.openmpt.org/statistics/. Windows 11 is currently at rougly 44% total, and growing steadily (we do not keep historic data though).

The combination of the following reasons made us require Windows 11 24H2 for the "standard" build variant in 1.33:

• Microsoft has broken support for older Windows Versions in the latest SDK without notice and maybe accidentally multiple times in the past
• as we are linking the C standard libray statically, updating the SDK (which the C standard library is part of) is the only way to get all bugfixes
• the latest SDK does not support 32bit ARM any more, and we do not want to mix different build options like SDK version for the modern "standard" builds for consistency reasons (this already affects 1.32)
• as you already mentioned, 1.33 will be released way after mainstream support for Windows 10 has ended
• demoting a platform to OpenMPT "legacy" does generally not (except for very minute details) reduce the feature set for users (this is different compared to the "retro" build variant, which has significantly altered feature support)
• the installer automatically selects the proper build variant ("standard" vs "legacy") without the user even noticing (again, different from the "retro" build variant)
• requiring Windows 11 24H2 gives us the possibility to also require SSE4.2 for the amd64 build (because Windows 11 24H2 requires it), allowing some possible performance improvements
• requiring Windows 11 gives as the option to also support ARM64EC (while still using the same SDK and and version settings for all "standard" builds)

[manx]

One minor detail: We currently build 1.33 for Windows 11 23H2 instead of Windows 11 24H2 because the latest SDK does not support building for 24H2 (yet, or due to an oversight on Microsoft's part). The amd64 build still uses SSE4.2 already, so x86, arm64, and arm64ec require 23H2, while amd64 requires 24H2. Ultimately, the goal is to build everything 1.33 for 24H2 when a suitable SDK becomes available.