4 ms·

Replace the Retiring Windows XP with Linux (2014)

71 points by righthand 10mo ago

righthand 10mo ago
YOLOTD?
HelloUsername 10mo ago
(2014) Recent related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465 "I installed a KDE Plasma theme that makes it look like Windows XP"
shevy-java 10mo ago
"By Carla Schroder - April 8, 2014". I am all for replacing MS products with Linux, but the article is old. We are not in a time travel capsule; at the least not most of us. I would more expect current topics to match, e. g. replacing Win11 with Linux. Also, I found WinXP actually better than Win7, Win10, Win11. At the least simpler to use.
- eimrine 10mo ago
  XP was inevitably not very stable, but I love it's sound stack.
  - nullpoint420 10mo ago
    What was unique about it? (genuinely curious, I'm coming from the Linux side of the pond)
    - eimrine 10mo ago
      Direct access to the sound hardware makes possible using huge discretization value, that's why Windows XP along with Mac the only OS able to produce a typical pop album. If you are doing music on your Linux PC, I would like to know your best ping from some MIDI instrument to the headphones. Last time I tried to do that I could not make it faster that 20ms but it was in 2010. So, I do not use Linux for any multimedia.
      - __del__ 10mo ago
        should be quite a bit faster than that now. 1-2ms would be normal
      - esseph 10mo ago
        "I run the Real-Time kernel and get a 7.06ms round-trip latency @ 48kHz with a 64-sample buffer, measured through Ardour using a loop-back from my SSL Alpha MADI AX." https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1458002-linux-pro-audio-workstation-2025-complete-no-nonsense-guide.html https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1458002-linux-pr...
      - nullpoint420 10mo ago
        Neat! It makes sense how more kernel/userspace abstractions would add more latency. > If you are doing music on your Linux PC, I would like to know your best ping from some MIDI instrument to the headphones. I am not, unfortunately. I've always wanted to get into digital music production, but sadly DAWs have always been elusive to me.
- aruggirello 10mo ago
  WinXP in a (properly configured) VM boots, runs faster than Win7, Win10 - at least under Linux. It is plagued by compatibility issues though - eg. no modern HTTPS, no modern browser, .NET issues, insecure SMB... you really need to know what you're doing. But armed with TuneXP 15, a recent AVG, CCleaner XP 1.38, sdelete, and WinKeyFinder175 (to be used together with UMSKT, basically the only way to reactivate it when your tweaking efforts inevitably trigger the - now broken - activation), you can start your adventure. No modern browser, mind you, though eg. "supermium 122" works, and don't forget read-only VMs or snapshots are your friends. I couldn't get virtio working, because VirtualBox 7 had a regression with it, so stick with emulated AHCI since VirtualBox 6 is so ...passé
- ch_123 10mo ago
  I remember switching my Windows computers from XP to the alpha releases of Windows 7 (back around late 2008/early 2009), and noticing improved stability. I remember needing to reinstall Windows at least once a year with XP, which was something I never needed to do with Windows 7 and onwards. This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it. Your mileage may have varied, and all that.
  - theandrewbailey 10mo ago
    > This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it. I remember buying one of the first AMD Turion X2 laptops with an ATI GPU (Acer Ferrari 5000?). Initially came with XP, but I installed Vista 64-bit on it (courtesy of my college's MSDN subscriptions) several months after release. XP BSODed about once per month under normal use, but with Vista, it never did. Everything I tried to use it with worked, it was fast enough and looked great! (The start menu's search bar was a killer feature for me! back when Windows search worked...) My college issued everyone Thinkpads, and when they had a Vista-based image, I got it, and my experience with Vista on that was likewise. I built a gaming desktop a while later and put Vista on it, and it had occasional BSODs. I also suspect the Nvidia drivers, but I recall that stability improved with Windows 7. For those reasons, I seem to be 1 of about 3 people on earth that has a mildly positive opinion about Windows Vista.
    - ch_123 10mo ago
      That's fair, and I suspect that if I either A) had a different hardware configuration at the time or B) had tried Vista about a year later than I did, I may have ended up with an entirely different opinion of it.
- pjmlp 10mo ago
  Which goes to show how often this comes up, yet Steam hardware survey is now about 3%, a decade later.
1970-01-01 10mo ago
>Immune to Windows malware, and you don’t need anti-malware software Ah yes! The old "Linux doesn't get viruses" argument. Thanks for sharing this bit of history with the class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_malware#Threats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_malware#Threats
- buzzardbait 10mo ago
  I haven’t had anti-malware software on Windows for over 10 years. If you’re computer literate then you don’t need it regardless of which OS you use. If you’re not computer literate and you click on every link that comes your way, not even the holy spirit of Linus Torvalds himself can save you from threats. So this claim is misleading at best and dangerous at worst.
  - DANmode 10mo ago
    Edit: pointed out a now corrected typo
    - buzzardbait 10mo ago
      My bad, fixed
  - zokier 10mo ago
    > I haven’t had anti-malware software on Windows for over 10 years. Unless you have gone through hoops to remove it, you most likely were still running Windows Defender Antivirus.
    - buzzardbait 10mo ago
      Fair. I was thinking of third party anti-malware that I have to go out and get, not something that is tightly integrated into Windows itself and enabled by default. Also, I don’t need the antivirus portion of Defender since I don’t click on executables or install apps willy nilly. It’s very light and silent so I wouldn’t go out of my way to turn it off. Plus the firewall is also part of Defender.
kbutler 10mo ago
More current discussion: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574707 One of these years is going to be the year of the Linux desktop! Hmm: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Linux+desktop&year_start=1991&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Linux+desktop&...
- buzzardbait 10mo ago
  The difference between Linux users and Jehovah’s Witnesses is that Christianity seems to be on the rise again.
  - razingeden 10mo ago
    I would think Windows is more comparable to JWs, because they’re always hysterical and saying the end is nigh every 10 years and getting rid of worldly possessions (like their “unsupported hardware” that they won’t need anymore in the “New System”) and then pushing the LTSC end of support prophecy date back .. to what is it now? 2014? 2032? 1914? 1976? Who’s counting? e-waste? Who caaaaaares, it’s the End Times and all things will be made new again, go ahead and use the planet like it’s a disposable Kleenex or the Ganges. Surprised they’re not standing outside of Whole Foods spreading the news with racks of Wired and PCMag. Or better yet, iPads they can go back in and remove any trace of prior publication so we can’t pull up old articles from 2014 or 2025 on HN and laugh at all the contradictions and stuff that didn’t check out - like we can with period-appropriate prints of the Watchtower or Awake! (Ex-JW)
    - buzzardbait 10mo ago
      No idea what you’re on about. I’m happy for you though. Or sorry that happened.
      - razingeden 10mo ago
        Okay let me try this again: you don’t have a point of reference on any of these three topics to make this joke in a way that’s even funny. Anyway. here’s a JW joke: Knock - knock!
k_bx 10mo ago
Loving the "ubuntu unleashed" recommendation at the end
kevin061 10mo ago
Please edit the title and add (2014), it's quite confusing to find over 10 year old articles in the Hacker News frontpage.
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71 points by righthand 10mo ago

YOLOTD?

(2014) Recent related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46566465 "I installed a KDE Plasma theme that makes it look like Windows XP"

shevy-java 10mo ago

"By Carla Schroder - April 8, 2014". I am all for replacing MS products with Linux, but the article is old. We are not in a time travel capsule; at the least not most of us. I would more expect current topics to match, e. g. replacing Win11 with Linux. Also, I found WinXP actually better than Win7, Win10, Win11. At the least simpler to use.

eimrine 10mo ago
XP was inevitably not very stable, but I love it's sound stack.
- nullpoint420 10mo ago
  What was unique about it? (genuinely curious, I'm coming from the Linux side of the pond)
  - eimrine 10mo ago
    Direct access to the sound hardware makes possible using huge discretization value, that's why Windows XP along with Mac the only OS able to produce a typical pop album. If you are doing music on your Linux PC, I would like to know your best ping from some MIDI instrument to the headphones. Last time I tried to do that I could not make it faster that 20ms but it was in 2010. So, I do not use Linux for any multimedia.
    - __del__ 10mo ago
      should be quite a bit faster than that now. 1-2ms would be normal
    - esseph 10mo ago
      "I run the Real-Time kernel and get a 7.06ms round-trip latency @ 48kHz with a 64-sample buffer, measured through Ardour using a loop-back from my SSL Alpha MADI AX." https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1458002-linux-pro-audio-workstation-2025-complete-no-nonsense-guide.html https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1458002-linux-pr...
    - nullpoint420 10mo ago
      Neat! It makes sense how more kernel/userspace abstractions would add more latency. > If you are doing music on your Linux PC, I would like to know your best ping from some MIDI instrument to the headphones. I am not, unfortunately. I've always wanted to get into digital music production, but sadly DAWs have always been elusive to me.
aruggirello 10mo ago
WinXP in a (properly configured) VM boots, runs faster than Win7, Win10 - at least under Linux. It is plagued by compatibility issues though - eg. no modern HTTPS, no modern browser, .NET issues, insecure SMB... you really need to know what you're doing. But armed with TuneXP 15, a recent AVG, CCleaner XP 1.38, sdelete, and WinKeyFinder175 (to be used together with UMSKT, basically the only way to reactivate it when your tweaking efforts inevitably trigger the - now broken - activation), you can start your adventure. No modern browser, mind you, though eg. "supermium 122" works, and don't forget read-only VMs or snapshots are your friends. I couldn't get virtio working, because VirtualBox 7 had a regression with it, so stick with emulated AHCI since VirtualBox 6 is so ...passé
ch_123 10mo ago
I remember switching my Windows computers from XP to the alpha releases of Windows 7 (back around late 2008/early 2009), and noticing improved stability. I remember needing to reinstall Windows at least once a year with XP, which was something I never needed to do with Windows 7 and onwards. This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it. Your mileage may have varied, and all that.
- theandrewbailey 10mo ago
  > This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it. I remember buying one of the first AMD Turion X2 laptops with an ATI GPU (Acer Ferrari 5000?). Initially came with XP, but I installed Vista 64-bit on it (courtesy of my college's MSDN subscriptions) several months after release. XP BSODed about once per month under normal use, but with Vista, it never did. Everything I tried to use it with worked, it was fast enough and looked great! (The start menu's search bar was a killer feature for me! back when Windows search worked...) My college issued everyone Thinkpads, and when they had a Vista-based image, I got it, and my experience with Vista on that was likewise. I built a gaming desktop a while later and put Vista on it, and it had occasional BSODs. I also suspect the Nvidia drivers, but I recall that stability improved with Windows 7. For those reasons, I seem to be 1 of about 3 people on earth that has a mildly positive opinion about Windows Vista.
  - ch_123 10mo ago
    That's fair, and I suspect that if I either A) had a different hardware configuration at the time or B) had tried Vista about a year later than I did, I may have ended up with an entirely different opinion of it.
pjmlp 10mo ago
Which goes to show how often this comes up, yet Steam hardware survey is now about 3%, a decade later.

1970-01-01 10mo ago

>Immune to Windows malware, and you don’t need anti-malware software Ah yes! The old "Linux doesn't get viruses" argument. Thanks for sharing this bit of history with the class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_malware#Threats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_malware#Threats

buzzardbait 10mo ago
I haven’t had anti-malware software on Windows for over 10 years. If you’re computer literate then you don’t need it regardless of which OS you use. If you’re not computer literate and you click on every link that comes your way, not even the holy spirit of Linus Torvalds himself can save you from threats. So this claim is misleading at best and dangerous at worst.
- DANmode 10mo ago
  Edit: pointed out a now corrected typo
  - buzzardbait 10mo ago
    My bad, fixed
- zokier 10mo ago
  > I haven’t had anti-malware software on Windows for over 10 years. Unless you have gone through hoops to remove it, you most likely were still running Windows Defender Antivirus.
  - buzzardbait 10mo ago
    Fair. I was thinking of third party anti-malware that I have to go out and get, not something that is tightly integrated into Windows itself and enabled by default. Also, I don’t need the antivirus portion of Defender since I don’t click on executables or install apps willy nilly. It’s very light and silent so I wouldn’t go out of my way to turn it off. Plus the firewall is also part of Defender.

kbutler 10mo ago

More current discussion: I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574707 One of these years is going to be the year of the Linux desktop! Hmm: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Linux+desktop&year_start=1991&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Linux+desktop&...

buzzardbait 10mo ago
The difference between Linux users and Jehovah’s Witnesses is that Christianity seems to be on the rise again.
- razingeden 10mo ago
  I would think Windows is more comparable to JWs, because they’re always hysterical and saying the end is nigh every 10 years and getting rid of worldly possessions (like their “unsupported hardware” that they won’t need anymore in the “New System”) and then pushing the LTSC end of support prophecy date back .. to what is it now? 2014? 2032? 1914? 1976? Who’s counting? e-waste? Who caaaaaares, it’s the End Times and all things will be made new again, go ahead and use the planet like it’s a disposable Kleenex or the Ganges. Surprised they’re not standing outside of Whole Foods spreading the news with racks of Wired and PCMag. Or better yet, iPads they can go back in and remove any trace of prior publication so we can’t pull up old articles from 2014 or 2025 on HN and laugh at all the contradictions and stuff that didn’t check out - like we can with period-appropriate prints of the Watchtower or Awake! (Ex-JW)
  - buzzardbait 10mo ago
    No idea what you’re on about. I’m happy for you though. Or sorry that happened.
    - razingeden 10mo ago
      Okay let me try this again: you don’t have a point of reference on any of these three topics to make this joke in a way that’s even funny. Anyway. here’s a JW joke: Knock - knock!

k_bx 10mo ago

Loving the "ubuntu unleashed" recommendation at the end

kevin061 10mo ago

Please edit the title and add (2014), it's quite confusing to find over 10 year old articles in the Hacker News frontpage.

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