A person contacted me, largely re something else, but they did state this, re LiveCode:
in June 2023 Windows standalones broke on account of how MS handled print drivers, and in December 2023 Mac standalones broke when Apple changed how it handled menus.
I was aware of the Mac menu thing: but not having any experience with Windows of any value I was unaware of the other one . . .
Yes, I had read that. Can't remember exactly where it was mentioned, but it was mentioned on here. It has since been resolved by Microsoft, with one of their driver updates. I believe HP and Epson printers were worst affected. Updating the print driver fixes the incompatibility in LC/OXT standalones.
It also affected word and publisher if memory serves.
There was a larger issue at play at the time, where Windows would source incorrect drivers through Windows update. Usually outdated ones. (on one of my work PCs - it kept fetching the old version of the AMD graphics card drivers due to the same related issue). This was later patched in a 'patch-tuesday' release, but I remember it causing issues for people on Windows 10 at the time.
Microsoft are known for doing this at the moment. It's no secret, but I had it confirmed from a meeting with our networking team where they were on a conference call to Microsoft over SSL vulnerabilities.
The gist of this 1hr, 43 minute meeting was: Microsoft confirmed that end users may see "an uptick in the frequency of KB [knowledge base] articles due to personnel rationalization"... in other words, they had laid off a lot of their Quality Assurance team - around about the same time that Windows 10 hit the 190x stages. Effectively making the 'End-users' their beta testing team.
So driver incompatibilities, or things breaking unexpectedly isn't out of the ordinary. Microsoft support forums are full of comments that say "Come on Microsoft, I can't believe this is still an issue" - or words to that effect...
I know I've posted and reported a few on there in the past, which have been acknowledged, yet they still haven't done anything about.
I expect bugs like this to happen multiple times - as is the case with all operating systems that use the 'Rolling-release' method. Yes, vulnerabilities might get patched - but testing isn't always as thorough as people would like, resulting in unexpected issues which are only picked up by the people who have to deal with them.
That's not just a criticism of Windows, but MacOS and Linux too. The 'rolling release' cycle is great if you have to go down that method for security hardening, otherwise - best to stay on a stable release branch, except the only way you can do that on MacOS now is really to block the apple update server in your router.
