I have been writing about this issue with previous hardforks as well, but since we have another upcoming hardfork in a day to Steem 0.15.0 it is time to rise it once more... The problem that many crypto currencies have in common is they do not put a lot of attention on Windows support and releasing official Windows binaries. Like it or not Windows is the major operating system used by most users and not having proper support for it is a real problem for a lot of people. Most people using Windows are not so advanced users, often they are not programmers or developers, so providing them with a source to compile something themselves and not official binary release is an issue. When the source you have does not even compile on Windows without some significant modifications things get even worse like in the case of Steem!
You cannot say to Windows users just go for Linux it is easy, the answer to this is just to go and F#CK yourself and the users going away to another crypto currency that does have proper support for the operating system they use. You want wider adoption, but are not providing proper support for the average user that uses Windows and that is not an advanced programmer or developer, he/she is just a regular user willing to support your project in some way or another, but you not willing to make the effort to make it easy for him/her to do so is just driving people away.
The situation with Steem is a bit different though, as the main user functionality is the Steemit platform and most of the users don't have to actually run steemd for anything they would normally need to do. However this is still limiting users on Windows that want to try mining Steem Power, no matter how hard it may be due to users with private GPU miners taking most of the mined tokens. I know that mining Steem is not a larger part of the ecosystem supporting Steem, witnesses do have much more important role, but still people that run a Steem node for mining are also supporting the network and they should not be denied that ability due to the lack of Windows release. Also, some developers or programmers that do want to work on a bot or a service related to Steem may also want to work on a local Windows-based node at least for the development part and them not being able to even compile the official source straight off GitHub on Windows is an issue.
We do not need to have to wait for some user to take the time to modify the source code to compile on Windows or to release a Windows binary of the latest Steem after some time (no guarantees that this will happen at all). We either need the source to also be easily compilable on Windows or at least the official Steem dev team to also release Windows binaries ahead of hardforks. This is a must have thing in order not to drive away users, but to attract more instead... an issue that needs to be addressed and the sooner the better.
If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.
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