I’ve played around with V8 but I’m still officially on V7, the only reason being that my PCB manufacturer does not support KiCAD V8 pcb files yet…
For me it is also important whether the plugins and other related tools support the new version… For example I heavily use KiBot so until it works with V8, I will stay with V7…
Pay attention to the plugins.
I did install KiCAD 8.0 yesterday and I imported the settings from thet 7.0.11
But all the plugins were uninstalled.
Oh wow, I was just about to upgrade but yikes, need to check if OSH Park can accept KiCad 8 files (they accept KiCad 7 files).
V8 produces industry standard Gerber, drilling and other fabrication outputs that any PCB house can use. Using native KiCad project files is an extra and theoretically might cause errors due to some version mismatch
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Thanks, I was aware, but so far have been just uploading the KiCad files rather than exporting to gerbers and drill files.
I (somewhat cheekily) asked OSH Park on Mastodon what the timescale was for v8 support, and Laen from OSH replied that it could be “as soon as this weekend” 
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Has there ever been serious consideration for giving KiCAD the ability to save files in a previous version? (Similar to the Office suites, which still give you the option to “Save this document in WORD 97 - 2003 format.”?) I imagine this would improve collaboration among, say, hobby user groups - or a prior client who is still using KiCAD 6.0.
Dale
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There is a feature request here for something of that sort:
Consider giving it a thumbs up on Gitlab to show support
The latest file format can have features that just cannot be described in the older file type.
Even your Word 97 example does not work reliably and I am not a user of the exotic features of Office.
Platform and version problems messing document formatting are a notorious feature.
In a ECAD suite, subtle errors can spoil the project with expensive consequences if you get a batch of broken boards built
It’s a lot harder than you think.
Perfect example is in Word if you select “save as old format”, you get a warning that things will break.
And things do break, sometimes horribly with formatting.
In Kicad while we are throwing the idea around of supporting it, things can similarly break and cost you thousands of dollars in damages 
For example, say we added teardrop support in v8, and now you want to save as v7. We have no choice but to remove all the teardrops when saving back as the v7 format. The downside is, teardrops are subtle and they may be impacting the manufacturing reliability of the PCB.
We can’t start trying to find ways to emulate teardrops in v7 because that’ll consume a ton of development time to cover every edge case, and actually makes things worse when the v7 saved file is now opened in v8 and it has strange not-teardrop objects acting as teardrops. Lol
In some of the more regulated work I do, if I open a old design in newer software, the entire design will have to get revalidated costing $$$$$$$. I don’t want that. I’ll use the old software just for that old design. Lol.
If I’m going to start spending significant amounts of time in the design in old software, then the question does shift to “well I can just open this in newer software and requalify the design because I’m doing significant amounts of work anyway”.
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You keep a copy of Kicad 6 for use with that client, just as you keep a copy of Eagle or whatever else for use with other clients: the cost of having, and keeping, clients.
As for hobby user groups: if you participate in the group, use the same software & version the group uses.
The only real reason I can think of for opening something in an older version is to correct a problem caused by ignorance because the user has not RTFM before saving.
Maybe the yellow warning shown before saving should read:
"This file was created by an older version of Kicad. It will be converted to the new format when saved and will no longer open in the older format "
Maybe the warning should also be changed to cover the whole screen, and bite the user on the nose. 
As an adjunct to that… “If you push something hard enough, it will fall over.”
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You are completely right of course, but it is also completely irrelevant. If you work in such a controlled environment where things have to be validated, then this function is clearly not for you. It would likely never work in a satisfactory way.
There are lots of use cases where having a form of forward compatibility is a big bonus, regardless of whether the conversion is incomplete or damaged. At the moment you just get a big middle finger in your face just because of a date / version string in the file, while actual changes are very likely small.
At the moment quite a lot of people are not using the Nightly version at all because of the incompatibility in file formats. I got bitten by this too some years ago. Back then the nightly was broken, it took some months to repair it (I guess it was 7 or more years ago) and I could not open my project in the stable version. That was several months of delay for my hobby project.
Suppose you find a project on gitlab / github you are interested in. If that project is in a newer KiCad version, you can’t even open it. The only way is to install that newer KiCad version. Having multiple KiCad versions installed on Linux is a *&^%$#@! You have to resort to things like snap or flatpak.
I am a big fan of forward compatibility. The Idea is that the S-Expression parsers just dumps any non-supported features (from a future KiCad version) in a log file in some organized way. This gives you both a “best effort” from KiCad, and some overview of which parts need some attention or repair.
I am in a similar situation. However I have been using KiCAD and in particular KiCAD 7 for just about 3 months. I now find myself asking whether I should upgrade to KiCAD 8. I like some of the new features in 8 such as ablity to import Altium and SolidWorks PCB files since I have used those heavily in the past and have some projects I will like to transfer for keep sake. Is there a way to have both installations on my PC?. Also how then do I transfer my settings from KiCAD 7 to the newer version 8
KiCad has a configuration directory for global settings (On Linux in: ~/.config/Kicad/), and you can compare and transfer settings in those directories (each Kicad version has it’s own subdirectory) with a source code merge program such as meldmerge. I’ve posted some screenshots in:
I plan to move to V8 when it will be 8.0.1 or 8.0.2.
Didn’t tried with V8 but when I was moving from V4->V5, V5->V6, V6->V7 I don’t remember problems with that. I suppose at first run I was asked if I want default settings or KiCad should copy settings from previous version.
The only problem I had with library lists - I had to copy them to non system or hidden directory to be able to point on them when asked if I want default or my old library list.
In case of anything went wrong you can delete KiCad V8 configuration directory and KiCad will be thinking it is run for the first time giving you chance to make different decisions.
Paul thanks for the pointers. I will check it out. Unfortunately not on Linux but will check out my installation on my Windows PC to see what I can find. Might just copy my current project files etc to external drive for protection and then do the upgrade. Just have a few projects saved anyway so not much to loose
@Piotr. good point about the libraries. Those I will like to keep as much as possible so will copy them somewhere else for safe keeping before doing any upgrades.
During installation KiCad doesn’t touch your projects, but of course backup is welcome.
I was writing about library lists only (C:\Users\{User}\AppData\Roaming\kicad\7.0\fp-lib-table and sym-lib-table), not the libraries themselves.
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