So, frankly I’m just looking for a stable long-term completely local and offline personal wiki that I can use on my old Windows 7 computer. Yes, yes, yes I know windows 7 is extremely old by now and not supported by anyone or anything. I use it for text based local offline projects, not playing games and surfing around. Really, I have a windows 11 laptop for anything that isn’t my own local projects. I just want a local offline program that will stay the same and ideally not change at all once I’ve installed it. I don’t need new features, I don’t need security updates, I only need to link and search notes within the program locally and offline.
I looked around for “obsidian on windows 7” and found this thread that noted that Obsidian. 1.1.16 worked on Windows 7, which would fulfil my criteria. However, in that thread one of the moderators (WhiteNoise) commented “As long as it works, fine, but we are not going it accept bug reports against this version and at some point something will break.”
I’m perfectly fine with not being able to make bug reports, that’s perfectly reasonable and I completely understand that. What I’m worried about is the assurance that “something WILL break”, which I would like some clarification on. Is this simply the assurance that the program will break because, well, everything breaks at some point? Or is there a some kind of self-destruct in the software that will force it to shut down if I don’t update it after a certain point?
Things I have tried
I couldn’t see anything related to this in the help docs. Searching for “windows 7” in the help forum brought up a few threads, but if I understand them correctly they are related to problems after installing newer versions of Obsidian, without really any information on what would happen if I just disabled updates and/or unplugged the network cable from the win 7 pc so it can’t access updates.
Don’t worry about it. You can safely use the version on your Win 7 if you were able to install it there.
Your files are all simple text files with some attachments, right? That’s what the program manages.
Although if you sync to the laptop, newer installations of Obsidian there could or will reformat your YAML frontmatter etc. according to new guidelines, etc.
Security-wise, you’re okay.
Always keep backups of your files, maybe some git file versioning, if you have time to read up on that.
Keep (various) installer files on your hard drives – rename them to any names, like: 'Obsidian_for_Win7`, Win11 whatever.
You’ll be fine, provided you are not a user of lot of actively maintained third-party plugins which may require an update of the core program, I might add… I’m not sure about backward compatibility of Dataview or other plugins…
Thank you!
That was what I suspected, but I thought it best to ask just in case. Syncing won’t be an issue, I’m fine with not using the laptop for this project, and I have a dedicated external hard drive for backups. Since I haven’t installed Obsidian yet I’m not too worried about plugins, from what I understand the core Obsidian program already has the features I’m most interested in
Yes exactly. Dataview is one of the most dependent community plugin what comes to the core idea of the plugin API. This exact idea is captured by the upcoming new feature called “Dynamic views”. We should expect Dynamic views to properly handle note references when these notes are renamed. That is the serious limitation currently in Dataview. It makes every Dataview query useless if notes are renamed unless some cumbersome custom note indexing is manually implemented by the user.
There are no timebombs. My comment in relation to that thread was in regard to the installer version.
That user wanted to stick with an old installer while keeping the internal update mechanism active. I warned them that at some point the mismatch would be fatal (I think we are there already on mac).
