Interesting that Adobe is tying things to the newest Windows. I was "forced" to update to Win 10 from 8.1 because 8.1 would not update past LR 7.5 because of some dll incompatibility. Since the ISO I used was version 1809, I'm on the newest version. Despite the fact that most Windows programs are backwards compatible to Win 7 (I still have a couple of PC running this), Adobe seems to be the outlier here.
I have some (limited) sympathy for Adobe on this.
I've not written code for Windows recently, but I write Android apps and there's a similar problem. Each new release of Android adds new features and new compatibility issues with the new Android release, and gradually obsoletes old releases.
You get into a process involving steps like:
- Check your app works with the new release, and if not debug it and if necessary make changes
- See if any new features of the new release can add new functionality or performance to your app, and if so write the code for it.
- Does the new code work on older releases of Windoes/Android/whatever? If not, is there some compatiblity work-around?
Step 3 leads to the difficult problems. If we've written code that takes advantage of the new version and it's not compatible with earlier OS releases then how seriously is this going to inconvenience users? What's the trade-off between the new feature (new functions, better performance or whatever) and the irritation to users to upgrade their OS when they don't want to?
There are quite a number of new features in Windows 10 not in Windows 7. For example the ability to handle high-DPI screens is much improved in W10. Anyone with a high-DPI screen (with a screen scale factor set to >100%) will have seen the fuzzy text that results from apps not written to be fully dpi-aware (i.e not using features available only in Windows 10).
Program writers don't want to be stuck with the lowest common deminator - only use features available on historic operating systems - so there will always be these awkward decision to make.