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I'm running Windows 7 Professional (64-bit), which Microsoft no longer supports. (I realize that I'm continuing to use Windows 7 at my own risk. But I'm physically disabled and use some assistive technology software that doesn't work on Windows 10/11. I'm looking into alternative software, so that I can upgrade my operating system to Windows 10/11 or macOS, but I need some more time.)

Currently, I have TeX Live 2020 installed. I'd like to update my distribution, so I was thinking to uninstall TeX Live 2020 and install TeX Live 2023. But I'd like to have some indication whether 2023 will work -- can be expected to work -- before I uninstall 2020 (which is working; it's just an old distribution). Does anyone here know?

Here's the page for TeX Live on Windows.

  • The link to the installer install-tl-windows.exe is given in the "Easy install" section on that page.
  • In the "64- and 32-bit binaries" section on that page, it states, "For users of Windows XP, the 2017 edition is the last one which they still can use." But I don't see any mention of Windows 7 compatibility.

Does anyone here know? Or is there a particular TeX Live user group or mailing list I should query?

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    I don't have an answer to your question, but you can have multiple TeX Live distributions living happily on a single machine so there should be no need to uninstall your 2020 version before installing the 2023 version. But the best place to ask this question would be the TeX Live mailing list.
    – Alan Munn
    Nov 20 at 21:42
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    I don't know the answer, but as for my experience a TeX Live distribution is very easy to uninstall: tex.stackexchange.com/a/618155/101651. You can try to install TeX Live 2023 and if it gives you errors, unistall it afterwards.
    – CarLaTeX
    Nov 20 at 21:53
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    Also, TL 2023 and onward will only supply 64bit binaries, so you first need to figure out whether you have a 64bit or 32bit version of Windows 7. If you have 32bit then you can't run the current version for sure. See How do I determine whether Windows 7 is 32-bit or 64-bit?
    – Alan Munn
    Nov 20 at 21:56
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    Sorry you say at the beginning that you're running the 64bit version, so I would guess that you can run TL2023.
    – Alan Munn
    Nov 20 at 21:57
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    And it's explicitly stated here that Windows 7 is supported.
    – Alan Munn
    Nov 20 at 22:10

1 Answer 1

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Quoting from the TeX Live Guide 2023:

As to Windows: Windows 7 and later are supported. Windows Vista may still mostly work, but TeX Live will no longer even install on Windows XP or earlier. TeX Live includes 64-bit executables for Windows.

This combined with the proviso that only 64bit binaries are supported, so long as your version of Windows 7 is 64bit, then it is in fact supported.

Furthermore, there's no need to uninstall older versions; multiple years of TeX Live can live happily on a single machine without interfering with each other.

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