So this past Tuesday, January 10th, Windows 8.1 hit its official end of support. No more security patches, no more anything, from here on it's just a museum piece that happens to still boot. I don't think a single major outlet ran this as a headline story, which is fair honestly, because who is still running Windows 8.1 in the year of our lord 2023? Turns out the answer is: me, on an old Dell that lives under my desk and does exactly one job, which is running a print server for a laser printer too stubborn to die.
I want to talk about this for a minute because Windows 8.1 has always felt like the unloved middle child of Microsoft operating systems and I think it deserves a small eulogy.
Remember Windows 8? The original, non-.1 version, from 2012? That thing was an act of hostility against anyone who used a mouse and keyboard. Full-screen tiles, no start menu, an entire "Metro" interface (they weren't even allowed to call it Metro for legal reasons by the end, some trademark dispute with a German company, but everyone called it that anyway) that assumed you were holding a tablet. I remember booting a new work laptop in early 2013 and just sitting there for a solid ten minutes trying to figure out how to open Control Panel. It wasn't intuitive, it was punishing. My dad, who is about as tech-averse as a person can be while still owning a smartphone, called me that same year asking how to "turn off the squares." I still don't think I fully explained it to him, I just remote-desktopped in and pinned Firefox to his taskbar and called it a day.
8.1 came out in October 2013 as basically an apology tour. They brought back a start button (not a full menu yet, that took until Windows 10, but a button that at least got you to the tile screen faster) and let you boot straight to desktop if you wanted. It was Microsoft quietly admitting they'd messed up without ever quite saying so, which if you've worked in any corporate environment you will recognize as an extremely normal thing for a large company to do.
And now it's just done. Ten years of extended support and normal support combined, and it's over. Consumer market share for 8.1 has been sitting somewhere under half a percent for ages according to StatCounter, so this isn't exactly a Y2K-scale event. But there are still ATMs, kiosks, and industrial control panels running this thing, and a lot of them aren't getting swapped out this week or possibly ever. That's the part that actually concerns me a little, not the home users like me being sentimental about an old Dell, but the point-of-sale terminal at some regional gas station chain that's going to keep running unpatched 8.1 until the hardware physically fails in 2029.
For what it's worth I did finally get around to reimaging that old Dell this week, out of some mix of guilt and mild security paranoia. Put a lightweight Linux distro on it instead, and the print server job runs exactly the same as it did before, which tells you something about how much horsepower that job ever actually needed. I kept the license key written on a sticky note stuck to the case for no reason other than nostalgia. I don't think I'll ever type it into anything again but it felt wrong to throw it out.
Anyway. If you happen to be one of the other five people running 8.1 somewhere, you should probably do something about that this week. Not a huge deadline in the grand scheme of things, but it's the kind of deadline that matters more the longer you ignore it.