Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

woodfromeden.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 323 posts

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#151

Post by dewey »

tomatodevice wrote: post #149

> The truth is I have never been hacked once in the eight years I have had this computer. And not since 2008 or 2009 with the one I had before. How can you be that sure and are you confident to connect this computer to any random public network? That's just a demonstration of ignorance.

You should also quote the rest of the paragraph then:

> Maybe I have been hacked but simply have not noticed. That is also a possibility. But I store some crypto currency on my computer and I make crypto transactions from time to time. If my computer had been compromised by an invisible attacker I figure that attacker would have had an interest in crypto assets.

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#152

Post by toastal »

badsectoracula wrote: post #118
branon wrote: post #57

This is not a sensible or technically sound thing to do. It is purely irrational. Win7 is already stuck on Chrome 110/111(?). You are not gaining much by doing this, and are assuming significant risk. Even if specific portions can be quantified away, it's the unknown unknowns that should scare you. Try a Linux distro again maybe? With some non-default themes and Wine, it really should make a better WinXP than WinXP.…

> This is not a sensible or technically sound thing to do. It is purely irrational. It is not purely irrational, in fact it is spelled right out in the article why the author does so: he finds the Windows XP interface much better as a user than any other OS. I can't say i fully agree personally, but the core of the problem and really the reason i don't see any of this as irrational is that people do get used to the i…

Doesn't MATE or other FOSS DE try to emulate an XP-like feel but a bit more modernized?

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#154

Post by themodelplumber »

Phew, relatable. I get this kind of well-rooted feeling with my Linuxes all the time.

Just this year I moved my T420 from a phenomenal Xubuntu 18.04 install that was _just_ great, to PCLOS. I'm happy with the result after a lot of work, but I know there are still a ton of things that aren't what they should be.

Hundreds of keyboard shortcuts yet to migrate, hundreds of little add-ons skipped, like "did I grab whatever the equivalent of gimp-addons is, since I couldn't use apt-clone", hundreds of little scripts un-integrated from my desktop, including genmon scripts that do valuable things, which don't even have an equivalent for porting to KDE.

Before that it was...Ubuntu Netbook Edition (UNE). Tiny screen but wow it worked amazingly well on my Linux-reseller MSI Wind Netbook. I could hardly bear the upgrades away from that, to different distros, since everything worked super well.

It's hard to feel torn between such UserLand concerns (my stuff is how I like it!) and regular ol' userland concerns (my software does what I need, with the following somewhat clever workarounds).

> Exactly why even very light-weight Linux versions like Lubuntu feels slow on my computers I do not know. Maybe they lack the drivers for hardware optimization compared to Windows.

I remember this EXACT feeling coming from Windows XP, lol. I never did figure out what the difference was, but it definitely went away for me starting around Windows 8 IIRC. Today I can't discern a difference except that occasionally it seems like Linux is faster by default.

It also felt incredibly unjust back then, to a lot of us happy Creative Labs users, to migrate to Linux and learn that our slick cards & low latency didn't work that way anymore, or at all.

Fun read! Thanks for sharing it.

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#155

Post by mikae1 »

q845712 wrote: post #46
jimbobimbo wrote: post #5

"My belief is that computer security is highly overrated. [...] This can actually be quantifiable. [...] In 2021 Project Zero registered 10 0-days that concerned Windows. [...] None affected Windows XP." Clever! Security by running an OS which none of the exploit authors are targeting anymore.

sure in the tech industry we all know the best practices and more or less try to follow them, but in general I've found that I often have hardware that keeps working long past the desire of the corporate overlords to support it: - a windows 2000 laptop that I only stopped using (a while) after win2k stopped getting security updates, and the linux i put on it didn't work very well. - a flip phone that was gloriously g…

> a 2013 macbook with a keyboard that still works, but it can't get the latest OS updates anymore, much like OP's XP machine.

If a lack of web browsers is the problem: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#156

Post by masswerk »

themodelplumber wrote: post #148
masswerk wrote: post #82

I can feel this. My main work computer was/is a late 2008 MacPro, running OS X 10.9.5 (the latest MacOS you can run officially on this). After one and half years, I've still not transitioned fully to a shiny, yellow M1 iMac standing next to it. The usability and productivity on the MacPro, its OS and the apps on it are much better, and, on top of it, it's all software that I own. The real dealbreaker is evergreen bro…

> The newest browser you can run on this is Firefox 78.15.0esr This made me wonder if there are still working dev kits/tools with browser components available in such a way as to provide a fairly simple pathway from basic dev skills (or just "web browser example" code) --> up-to-date browser engine, running on 10.9.5? Thinking of somewhat more obscure dev tools too, e.g. PureBasic, etc.

This would have been a viable path, when WebKit was still "a thing" and enjoyed some integration. I guess, with WebKit2, things became more complicated and resource heavy. Given the rapid development cycles and feature releases, I doubt an integrated web-view would be able to keep up, nowadays. Esp., if nothing short of 100% compatibility to current Chrome will do.

(That said, Firefox 78.15.0esr works still fine in most cases, but I doubt that this will be the case much longer, mostly because of CSS feature adoption.)

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#157

Post by mikae1 »

nine_k wrote: post #102
evmar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are running a Chrome from 2016, so they are vulnerable to ~every exploit found in Chrome since then.

Won't a modern version of Chromium build for XP, with some tweaking?

https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy exists for macOS, so it would only be fair if there was something similar for old versions of Windows. :)

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#158

Post by realusername »

ihateolives wrote: post #126
nextos wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the OP just needed to enable e.g. Nouveau with the appropriate kernel module parameters? I am regularly using a 14 year-old MacBook on plain X and it is surprisingly fast.

> just needed to enable e.g. Nouveau with the appropriate kernel module parameters? And that's why Linux will stay in the server for majority of people, not on their desktop. "You just need to enable something with some parameters and you're all set!" Seriously?

There's a good chance that on windows 10, you would get a laggy 800x600 after install with such an old config which is worse

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#159

Post by mikae1 »

masswerk wrote: post #156
themodelplumber wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The newest browser you can run on this is Firefox 78.15.0esr This made me wonder if there are still working dev kits/tools with browser components available in such a way as to provide a fairly simple pathway from basic dev skills (or just "web browser example" code) --> up-to-date browser engine, running on 10.9.5? Thinking of somewhat more obscure dev tools too, e.g. PureBasic, etc.

This would have been a viable path, when WebKit was still "a thing" and enjoyed some integration. I guess, with WebKit2, things became more complicated and resource heavy. Given the rapid development cycles and feature releases, I doubt an integrated web-view would be able to keep up, nowadays. Esp., if nothing short of 100% compatibility to current Chrome will do. (That said, Firefox 78.15.0esr works still fine in m…

> The newest browser you can run on this is Firefox 78.15.0esr

I'll guess you'll be happy to see this: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy :)

Post reply on HN