[disruptiveink]

I use a XP VM on a ARM Mac as it's a handy way to run most Win16/32 exes that won't run properly in Wine. Old random utilities, random OEM software required to upgrade old devices' firmware, silly Win16 apps, the works. Anything more recent than XPis too heavy for x86 VM emulation on ARM and Win 10/11 ARM come with their own quirks that are not worth dealing with for my purposes.

It's handy to have a modern browser at hand to not have to shuffle files around between the host and the VM, so you can do Google -> website of the tool in question (plus uBlock, so the main source of infection, ad networks, is taken care of). The likelihood of either Google or whatever very focused and targeted website I happen to visit to be serving XP malware is negligible.

And if it does get infected, congrats, you infected a VM with no connection to the host or shared folders that has no personal files and is powered up maybe 30 minutes per year.

It's not zero, no, but to say there's no use case and it's the same as running around in scissors blindfolded is a huge simplification.

[saagarjha]

Running XP in a VM is really a very different threat model from “I run XP”