Hello,
I am using Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit - and cannot find any official statement that this is not supported anymore. Since the download pages only distinguish between win32 and win64, I spent quite some time for the search - and only found a completely outdated wiki-page:
https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Supported_operating_systems
and a statement for versions before 1.x:
https://inkscape.org/de/release/0.92.3/windows/64-bit/

Nevertheless, I am quite sure that Windows 7 is not supported anymore, because there are invisible scroll bars, invisible combo and check boxes as well as invisible menu highlightings all over the place! See the attached screenshots!
I have selected several of the shown check boxes, but there is no visible feedback of the selection. The combo box looks like a simple button with the text "Helligkeitsschwellwert" - but I still can open it like shown in the second screenshot. The menus do not give any feedback when browsing them with mouse or keyboard, but they still open like shown in the third screenshot.
Though the program seems to work, it is completely unusable due to all these problems with the user interface!

Further explanations
My current use case:
My normal, working version is 0.92.4-x64. I just wanted to try out the most current version, because I read there were new options for tracing bitmaps. The autotrace options do keep crashing, so I will stay at my old version anyway. But I still want to know if current versions are still supported for Windows 7?

What I did:
- I always use Inkscape in form of the 7-Zip-archive. But, when I started the unpacked current version, it kept crashing so fast that I could not test anything! Maybe it shares the settings with my working (and to this time still running) version?
- So I tried the portable version (https://inkscape.org/~GordCaswell/%E2%98%85inkscapeportable-111paf) - but this also does not start when another Inkscape is still running. So I had to close my working version.
- After starting 1.1.1 I only set the "theme" back to win32, to get back all that wasted space of and between the huge icons - and to get something less eye straining like I am used to from my working version.
- Than I dragged and dropped a simple .png picture onto the working surface and tried out some bitmap tracings. - Here I got aware of all the missing UI elements, in between the recurring crashes whenever I choose the new autotrace options. But I cannot even state which options I use, since I cannot see the state of the check boxes!

All together, it's some really frustrating first view of the most current version. Sorry. :-(

Meanwhile, I tested again, without the previously single changed option (the UI theme) after starting the current version.
This time I get to see some designed and animated UI elements (sometimes visible scroll bars, sometimes not, depending on mouse movements) which do work but don't use UI controls of the operating system. I personally don't like them and want to get rid of the animations, rounded corners and gradients to get a more default windows look and feel. At least the dark theme seems to be less eye straining. (But many selections and icons are hardly visible as well as the bright white text on a dark grey background also don't look that relaxed to me.)

So, the new finding seems to be that the theme "win32" is completely broken!

Right now, I don't know what to do. If (and how?) I should rename this thread?
As I see it, my original question is still valid, since the only theme which provides a more classic look and feel cannot be used. So, there is no intend to support classic, efficient (/ clear / not animated) windowed software anymore?

I see that current UIs are more playful but I prefer a more clean and efficient working environment. It's a pity that this is not possible to get anymore.
(Little digression: The autotrace-option for tracing bitmaps does not always crash the whole application. Sometimes it seems to crash silently, so that further calls won't do anything [no result and no entry in the edit history, status bar states that the image does not contain bitmap data!?] until the application is restarted manually.)

I also prefer obvious controls... a UI should not be an Easter-egg hunt.

That said, is there some reason to avoid the .msi installer? It is probably as Windows as one can get.

I don't see the connection to the type of or the absence of the installer.
For verification purposes I tested the .exe and the .msi installer on a virtual machine which never saw any Inkscape before (which could be important for installer use cases).
As expected it was not making any difference on how the application came to the machine – lots of missing and broken UI elements with the theme "win32"!

(Just for explanation: I do not like applications cluttering up the windows registry as well as application and user specific directories. This limits the possibilities of using different versions simultaneously, mostly prohibits the usage on different machines with the same settings [like on a USB flash drive] and leads to much more possible problems [like destabilising the operating system or other applications, opening up whole new targets for viruses or simply leaving lots of trash within the registry and named directories during uninstallation] which are simply not possible when using classic portable applications which store their settings and resources within their own local directories. - I do not only use them when I want to use the application on a flash drive but also whenever it is possible! This lowers the burden on the OS and additionally enables me to test more critically changes [plug-ins or settings I might not be able to undo completely, once I applied them], just by testing on a safety copy of the whole application directory. I never have to uninstall, restart, re-install, restart and re-apply all the settings when I use the portable version of the software!)

brynn

Inkscape developers primarily use the Devel mailing list to communicate, so that's the best place to introduce yourself.   But you can also find developers on their chat channel.