more money than brains

i’m definitely stealing this phrase, thanks

i think samsung doesn’t manufacturer printers anymore since a very long time ago. iirc it’s a rebranded hp printer (at least in samsung’s homeland korea) and quite notorious for breaking often

there are stuff like miranda-ng but i don’t think there’s one for the platforms you need sadly… fuck proprietary protocols and networks

seamonkey is not related to palemoon’s uxp/goanna stuff

seamonkey but it’s not compatible with a lot of websites these days sadly. hopefully they’ll catch up soon.

installing apps for everything

proton allows generating woreguard config for a specific server even on free plans on their wrbsite, worth checking out

or you could just have a script tobperiodically check your external ip with something like icanhazip.com and automatically make needed changes

bruh that’s such a huge red flag, honestly i’m confused if this post is genuine or bait…

ofc there could be a zero day, but highly unlikely if there’s too little attack surface. honestly i consider my win7 setup with firewall much more secure than some random person’s win11 box.

a targeted attack just for me surely could work, but that’s VERY unlikely to ever happen. there are much easier targets if some gov agent wants my personal info lol. and this sort of attack would be possible on any systems even if i keep it updated.

i use the machine for two proprietary softwares. one is a loffice writer/m$word equivalent called Hangul, the other is a whatsapp equivalent called KakaoTalk. you need these for basic stuff in this country because everyone else uses it unfortunately.

for hangul there’s a native linux build (proprietary ofc) that’s of alpha quality, barely usable for reading. WINE kinda works except it sometimes crashes on some specific features, and I don’t want it crashing while writing documents.

for kakaotalk there’s no linux build, only mac/win/android/ios. WINE works but very poorly so I need windows, and win7 works better than win10 for me since they dropped support for win7 then introduced antifeatures (mostly ads) but still keep the last win7 version functional. i RDP into the win7 machine to chat. (win7 is also much better than later versions especially when RDPing, since they support the proper classic theme unlike later versions that needs the shitty aero theme and dwm at all times. looks better, and also much faster over slow network)

realistically not theoretically, how would you get pwned by running an outdated windows install behind a firewall, with in/outbound controlled by a very narrow allowlist.

i literally do this with win7. the machine’s in/outbound network is fully blocked except for a SOCKS5 proxy i’m running on some freebsd box. the program i need to run on it supports setting a proxy so that works, and web browser (a modded/latest build of firefox) also uses that proxy along with uBlock Origin and nuTensor (fork of uMatrix) so my javascript and fonts is blocked unless I explicitly enable it, which again is a very narrow allowlist.

there’s nothing I can’t lose on the machine, and even if it gets pwned I can afford it and can just restore from the latest backup. (ofc this should be what everyone does even on a fully updated system, user mistake can always get one pwned)

it’s pointless to keep explaining when our opinions are so different. I disagree with your comment, and I use the downvote button to express my disagreement to the specific comment. I don’t have anything against you, sorry if this bothered you.

(votes are public on the fediverse anyway, and it’s not like reddit where your karma decreases and you get banned if you lose too much karma…)

more like 7 years. posready 2009 got updates till 2019, many xp users apply updates from it.

i’m not telling them to switch to xp. i’m saying that considering the fact that XP still remains usable to many after all these years, win10 will remain fully usable for a lot more years to come.

3.5? what? no, the latest firefox that runs is 56 and the latest esr 52. seamonkey supported xp till 2019 with 2.49.5. in 2026, there’s a fork of latest chromium with support for winxp backported including full sandbox. there are security holes in the os, yes, but the kind of ‘power user’ i mentioned are the ones who know how to use XP properly in present day and can reasonably setup their network to block all unnecessary stuff, not run fishy softwares, etc. see win2k.org for an example of such power user patching their legacy system to the extreme and keeping it usable.

i’m not suggesting to run XP. I’m saying it’s still possible, so there’s no way win10 will be unusable in a short time from now. At least I’m reasonably sure it will remain filly usable for power users with all kinds of workarounds for around 10 or more years. those who are not more comfortable with doing such workarounds can switch to linux or other similarly free system, which is also of course what i recommend.

back to the future

the thirteenth floor

taken

well there still are people using XP and 7 on personal computers in 2026. there’s a tool that makes a lot of win10+ programs work on 7/8.1, and also a lot of patched softwares that runs on those older versions. or workarounds that make the last compatible version still function well.

there always will be a workaround, though at some point it might be easier to just use a linux vm for some stuff

looks awesome! commenting to not forget to try this out later…

tbh it isn’t that big of an issue to use an outdated OS as long as the user is competent enough and has basic security measures. power users (like the ones on lemmy) can just use whatever that works well enough for them, be it WinXP, OS X, …

and switching to linux isn’t that big deal either, there’s no need to get rid of the existing machine/windows install if there’s something that works better there

tbh there are really a lot of things that aren’t on the repo or even the slackbuilds (kinda like arch AUR), kinda takes time to manage and install other packages. still i can’t find a better distro yet so i’m keep using it…

i should try gentoo/void/alpine/arch someday but i’m too lazy.

i do use freebsd :) and occasionally win7/10…

usage goes like freebsd >>> linux > m$win

i have slackware 15 on all, it’s great how i can just copy over binaries and they just run because all the linked libraries are the same version