by BrevCampagnolo » Fri Dec 06, 2013 11:31 am
Last statistics I saw, something like 70% of the PCs in the world still were running WinXP.
I have Win7 & Win8 but they have too many differences that amount to an impairment rather than an improvement. I use them regularly to develop and maintain familiarity but I do most of my 'serious' work either on XP or Linux Mint.
It's not a matter of Ludditeism or resistance to change, XP simply does all the things 90% of PC owners buy their PCs for, and its GUIs are more intuitive (shorter ramp-up time), than either Win7 or Win8. Granted, some of that stems from the fact that functions like Windoze Explorer haven't changed materially from Win95 to WinXP, but the reason some stuff didn't change was because it was pretty darned functional from the git-go. The "logical" ordering in the later M$ products is anything but.
Win7 wouldn't be even marginally useful if I hadn't installed Classic Shell and 7+ taskbar tweaker. And no matter how long I work with Win8, it's still like trying to tie my shoes wearing mittens.
I'm a command line guy. Anybody who tries to encumber me getting to the command line is obviously evil. Win8 is every bit as bad as OSX at making it as difficult as possible for the user to get to the command line (until you install Start8). And the Metro interface is a horrible handicap to anyone whose monitor screen is bigger than 3"x4".
Something as simple as editing your 'hosts' file becomes a major undertaking in Win7 or Win8, all because M$ felt the need to reinvent the wheel. And give it three sides.
The entire reason M$ is so intent on obsoleting WinXP is they already had >90% market penetration. Their dominance was so complete that any further growth depended on the market itself expanding. So they're trying to create a new demand where it otherwise would not exist by forcing you to give up you XP box for something "better." Except it isn't, not in any meaningful way, not to the average PC user.
After they introduced Vista (pardon my french), M$ initially prohibited their big box manufacturers (Dell, HP, etc) selling new systems with XP on them. But in time they relented because those manufacturers were complaining that the mom&pop computer shops were making a killing "upgrading" Vista (pardon my french) to WinXP. But XP has long since been cracked, and is available slipstreamed with your choice of service packs (and accessorization) through your local bittorrent client (not that I condone that sort of thing, I'm merely stating a fact). And accessory manufacturers already have stated they will continue building legacy XP drivers for their new products. And even if they didn't, the cracker community these days is sophisticated enough to make them if the manufacturers won't.
So I think XP will remain in widespread use, even after April 2014. Which M$ will view as a missed opportunity, especially if the (underground) cottage industry that I foresee refurbishing XP, and tweaking it to work with new hardware, comes to pass. I well can imagine the market share running bootlegged XP will be larger than that running *NIX. And M$ will just have to get into that act.
Then they'll release Windoze XP Classic. New Coke, part deux.
As for the Leenuks, KDE4 was causing me more pain and suffering than even Win8 (but Win7 was a push). Then I chanced across Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop. Now I are a happy Leenuks camper.
-- Campy
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
- Popular Mechanics, 1949