I work in IT, run Mint on my travel laptop, and yet at home use the desktop I got 10 years ago, still with Win 8.1. And I use my current desktop quite extensively. There’s still a lot of perfectly fine hardware with outdated OS floating around, and I’d argue that a significant portion of it is used by people experienced enough that they know what they are doing. Much of that will shift towards Linux. Not most of it, I’ll grant you that, but more than people expect.
I used Classic Shell to make it look as much as WinXP Classic as possible, so I’m happy with how it looks. As for vulnerabilities, knock on wood, so far I didn’t have any issues (but I do run Bitdefender). I use it for gaming (GOG, newest game being older than my PC), photo editing (Gimp with Google Nik Collection), browsing, and office work. Nothing too demanding. But to be honest, I would have switched to Mint a long time ago if I found a Linux alternative for Smart Switch (my phone backup utility) and Garmin Connect for my watch. Those two are the only two pieces of software that keep me with Windows, and at this point I’m actually thinking of a cheap mini PC just for those two as a direct pass-through to my NAS backup.
You see the issues if you have sleeping agents on your machine and thus being part of botnets…
Additionally, it could be the entry point into your network, if connected to the internet. Your other modern PC trust you, to keep your LAN clean, so they are not as protective about LAN stuff than about stuff coming from WAN.
I work in IT, run Mint on my travel laptop, and yet at home use the desktop I got 10 years ago, still with Win 8.1. And I use my current desktop quite extensively. There’s still a lot of perfectly fine hardware with outdated OS floating around, and I’d argue that a significant portion of it is used by people experienced enough that they know what they are doing. Much of that will shift towards Linux. Not most of it, I’ll grant you that, but more than people expect.
This is so cursed i have to ask why? Windows 8.1 is riddled with vulnerabilities and its ugly.
I used Classic Shell to make it look as much as WinXP Classic as possible, so I’m happy with how it looks. As for vulnerabilities, knock on wood, so far I didn’t have any issues (but I do run Bitdefender). I use it for gaming (GOG, newest game being older than my PC), photo editing (Gimp with Google Nik Collection), browsing, and office work. Nothing too demanding. But to be honest, I would have switched to Mint a long time ago if I found a Linux alternative for Smart Switch (my phone backup utility) and Garmin Connect for my watch. Those two are the only two pieces of software that keep me with Windows, and at this point I’m actually thinking of a cheap mini PC just for those two as a direct pass-through to my NAS backup.
WinXP is such a nice theme. Good choice.
😶
You see the issues if you have sleeping agents on your machine and thus being part of botnets…
Additionally, it could be the entry point into your network, if connected to the internet. Your other modern PC trust you, to keep your LAN clean, so they are not as protective about LAN stuff than about stuff coming from WAN.
Yeah… their post gave me the willies, too. It’s like walking into Russia/Ukraine’s front lines and yelling “fuck Putin” over and over.
“Well, I wasn’t shot yet, so it’s fine”
…
Have you tried running those things in wine or something like bottles?