Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ocdtrekkie 3430 days ago
Is Windows XP still "good enough"? Even if it still got security fixes, the actual security model it was built on is definitively no longer adequate for the modern world. I'd very much argue Windows 7 is rapidly falling into that territory as well. It's easy to make this "forever Windows 7" argument today, just like it used to be that people could say they were never leaving XP.

But in reality, we're rapidly approaching the point where we absolutely need to be able to sandbox apps and segregate them from the platform like with UWP.

While the basic functionality of the OS you need may not change much, the constantly moving target of security definitely will, and both 8 and 10 introduced significant improvements in security.

2 comments

And before that people were vowing never to upgrade to XP, and before that people said 98 would be the last version of windows they would ever run...
The difference is that after XP, the majority of users didn't upgrade.
Windows 7 did get a majority of the Windows market.

Windows 10 will get a majority of the Windows market. In fact, in some areas -- the USA and the UK, for example -- Windows 10 overtook Windows 7 late last year, on StatCounter's numbers.

Yes, when you trick and manipulate users into upgrading, it results in a substantial short-term boost in market share.
I don't think moving people from one version of Windows to another counts as an increase in market share.

And since they gave away a free upgrade for the life of the device, at a considerable cost in terms of servers and bandwidth, it wasn't profiteering either.

And since they gave away a free upgrade for the life of the device, at a considerable cost in terms of servers and bandwidth, it wasn't profiteering either.

Pro tip: when a for-profit company does something that appears to be uncharacteristically altruistic...

...Aw, heck, you know what? Never mind. Enjoy the garden.

> Is Windows XP still "good enough"?

If you have hardware that only runs in XP you don't care.

I have more than a few Windows 7 installations that are nothing but hosts for virtual machines that run XP.