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

251–260 of 323 posts

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#251

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

sylens wrote: post #225

So many problems with this piece >> My computer is also not some old rubbish. It has an Intel Core2Duo CPU with 4 Gb RAM. It was top of the line in 2009. Just because you had a top of the line PC in 2009 does not disqualify it from being 'old rubbish' in 2023. A Core2Duo is ancient at this point. >> The truth is I have never been hacked once in the eight years I have had this computer. Or something has been compromis…

The irony from the author's statement, is that Core 2 Duo was in no way top of the line in 2009.

Core 2 Quad was already out for a couple of years, and in 2009 Intel already had the Nehalem based i7 with quad cores and 8 threads that moved the goalposts an insane amount it became a staple CPU for the next decade till Ryzen launched.

I still have a Core 2 Quad and Duo chips kicking around the house but at around 17 years old they're long in the tooth already to be remotely useful at anything. Even a raspberry pi would be better.

A 4 year old Android flagships has more performance than those, let alone performance per watt where they're just not great to fire up at EU energy prices. At 65w-95w they make the most insane gas guzzling machines you could ever (not) want.

Unless you get your energy for free, best sunset and scrap them for something more power efficient.

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#252

Post by sublinear »

sylens wrote: post #225

So many problems with this piece >> My computer is also not some old rubbish. It has an Intel Core2Duo CPU with 4 Gb RAM. It was top of the line in 2009. Just because you had a top of the line PC in 2009 does not disqualify it from being 'old rubbish' in 2023. A Core2Duo is ancient at this point. >> The truth is I have never been hacked once in the eight years I have had this computer. Or something has been compromis…

To be fair, there's a lot of outdated hardware and software running behind the scenes right now where the mitigation is precisely to "firewall" it, but I feel like the sense in which that's used colloquially by people who do this for a living and the way that word is used by this guy are miles apart.

In very broad terms the idea should be to profile what the outdated thing is actually needed for and restrict all possible requests to this narrow allowlist and put it behind a gateway that handles the actual connections from the rest of the network and rewrites the requests it forwards.

This guy is talking about arbitrary usage by a human which is far more risky and all he thinks is needed is to block off some unused ports and protocols.

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#253

Post by causi »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #234

They should really try XFCE, it feels extremely similar to old-school windows (95/XP). You can even theme it to look unbelievably similar to old windows. I feel like them installing the latest Xubuntu with XFCE and Firefox with an ad blocker would let that old laptop run for many more years of service. Heck, the latest version of Wine probably runs all their old XP software just fine as-is too.

How does XFCE feel like old windows? To me it looks a lot more like OSX than Windows.

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#255

Post by julesnp »

slim wrote: post #165
extr0pian wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author said that their experiences with Linux was slow (Debian and Lubuntu were examples) and had no intention of using Linux because of these experiences. Personally, I don't know what they're talking about, but I've always had a smoother/faster (albeit a bit clunky/glitchy sometimes) with Linux than Windows. Even when I dual booted Win7 and Ubuntu, Linux was always faster. Currently, I'm using XFCE w/ Arch on a…

You should try, say, Debian 12 on an old computer with encrypted disks. it's unusable

Encrypted disks would be the key issue here, older CPUs likely can't handle the encryption work required.

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#256

Post by pcdoodle »

I think his windows 7 build will be fun. It will experience just as long of a tail as XP due to huge amounts of ram being supported. I'm sure the XP machine he's getting off, would blow a Pi4 out of the water utility wise. I don't mind this article one bit. Thanks for sharing!

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#257

Post by detuur »

jbstack wrote: post #250
lionkor wrote: post #168

Ubuntu has always been this weird OS for me. Its not free enough or fast enough to be linux, it feels like a knockoff of something, but i cant put my finger on it. Their DE is just such a horrible POS. I had one extension/addon (?), which, due to some JS problem (all those extensions/addons are written in js), was slowly, over hours, hogging more ram, until eventually OOMimg the entire DE. Sure, this is just a one-of…

It seems strange to blame a distribution for a problem you had with a DE. Just change the DE. Or download one of the many Ubuntu flavours which has your preferred DE preinstalled.

Worse, they had a problem with a third-party add-on they installed. An add-on that likely would've been either two orders of magnitude more complex or straight-up impossible on Windows or macOS.

I've had my fair share of OOMs and crashes because of shell customization on Windows and they were all far harder to deal with.

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#258

Post by qbasic_forever »

causi wrote: post #253
qbasic_forever wrote: post #234

They should really try XFCE, it feels extremely similar to old-school windows (95/XP). You can even theme it to look unbelievably similar to old windows. I feel like them installing the latest Xubuntu with XFCE and Firefox with an ad blocker would let that old laptop run for many more years of service. Heck, the latest version of Wine probably runs all their old XP software just fine as-is too.

How does XFCE feel like old windows? To me it looks a lot more like OSX than Windows.

Change its appearance theme to the windows one (in the settings app), disable the bottom bar/dock and move the top bar down to the bottom. Now you've got a typical windows style start menu. XFCE is very flexible and you can configure the docks/bars to feel like old windows, old Mac, etc. Its file manager (thunar) is basically a a perfect copy of Windows file explorer from the XP era.

If you want to go full old windows it's an easy next step to run this theme's setup script: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#259

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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…

There are up-to-date builds of Chromium for 10.9.5. (Actually, they work as far back as 10.7, Lion)

https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy

I daily-drive this browser on a 10.9 Mavericks Hackintosh. It's great.

Re: My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)

#260

Post by detuur »

refracture wrote: post #44

Move from one EOL OS to another. You do you, you’ll be fine until you aren’t.. I feel bad for anyone you convince that this is okay.

I wonder if he would've been happy running ReactOS or something like Haiku or SerenityOS.

It seems that the major reason why XP worked for him was how dead simple it was. The fact is that there's no modern "simple" OS. I know. I've looked. The point-and-click simplicity of the 90s is quite plainly no longer out there. Even macOS, championed for its supposed simplicity, has grown a large amount of extraneous features and an outright hostility to those who try to use it in a nonstandard way.

Coming to think of it, it wouldn't even matter. All of the OSes I've suggested struggle with the same issue as WinXP, which is that there's no modern browser support. SerenityOS seems to be the only one which is making any actual strides to fixing that with its Ladybug browser (which theoretically could be ported to the other OSes), but even that is a work-in-progress.

Post reply on HN