Re: Brainless Debian Stable installation and usage?
On Fri, 07 Mar 2014 18:54:13 +0100
Guy Marcenac <guy@posteurs.com> wrote:
> Le 07/03/2014 02:16, Steve Litt of Troubleshooters.Com a écrit :
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I have several friends, with Windows XP, who are now considering
> > moving to Linux because of XP's impending stoppage of support.
> > Normally, I'd
> >
> Hello,
> I don't understand why the lack of support leads you to this huge
> change for your buddies on these old machines.
> Support or not they will continue to run, simply MS won't fix any
> bug... Surely, there is something I did not understand about your
> needs.
No, they will continue to run fine if kept isolated from any
contamination via the Net, USB sticks, emails etc.
The point is that security holes won't be fixed. That would be of some
concern to Linux users, but it's very serious for Windows users, the
targets of nearly all malware. The marketing hype about 'new operating
systems' is just that, and Windows 8 contains a great deal of 7, of
Vista, of XP and probably earlier versions. I haven't checked 8, but
Win 7 still contains Edlin, an early DOS text *line* editor.
So every month, the security advisories will come out, 'remote code
execution' flaws will be announced which affect everything from Vista
onwards, but they won't mention XP. The bad guys will be studying this
information carefully, and will gain insight into problems which do
also affect XP but the fixes for which won't be backported... it will
be a bad time to be an Internet-connected XP user, and there will
indeed still be a fair number of them. The AV people won't support XP,
either.
So I'll be wiping XP off my old laptop (actually refitting the original
40GB drive, as the 120GB drive which has run for the last eight years
is showing early signs of dementia) and running only Sid on it.
--
Joe
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