Your evangelical smiles,
     shiny badges of honor,
     and performative sympathy for minorities —
     these are nothing but noise to desperate users.

For they seek not your vanity-driven pollution,
but pain-relieving solutions — solutions crafted
to ease the burden outside your privileged bubble:
     software that endures,
     websites that welcome everyone,
     or even a font you can actually read.

Out there, in that vast swath of the Earth
where a refurbished laptop from AliExpress
is heralded as a vehicle of genuine hope,
what do you deliver unto them?

Unto the common folk who
     till the soil,
     tend the hearth,
     and rear young souls?

Excessive system requirements.
Fads that shatter compatibility.
Forced, arbitrary obsolescence.
Maze-like, jargon-filled interfaces.
Careless handling of non-English data.
And bloated, bloated, bloated binaries.

Yet, because “hey, I built it in my spare time for free”,
     you expect nothing but praise,
     turn a deaf ear to maintenance pleas,
     and dismiss grievances as ramblings of the ungrateful.

Enough.

Let us build what shelters, rather than excludes.

IT shills tell you Windows 7 is a ghost, a dead man walking.
Silicon Valley expiration dates, worshiped like laws of physics.
Statcounter charts on Wikipedia napkins, passed around as gospel.
Mainstreamers don't doubt — they parrot, then sleep like babies.

But those numbers have a smell.

So-called stats rest on a JavaScript beacon pinned to a million sites¹.
Except heavy hitters don't feed it. No Amazon, no Facebook, no YouTube.
Even in the back alleys of the Internet where that beacon still bleeds,
users pull down the blinds — their ad-blockers kill such peepers cold.

It was a rigged deck from the start.

Nobody can trace for sure how many souls survive on Windows 7.
The house only counts the hands at the table and calls it the world.
Yet mechanics still sweat compiling and backporting for an exiled OS.
You don't spend unpaid nights throwing lifelines into a graveyard.

_{© 2026 Aleksandr Flawrist. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.}