This is super cool! I admire those who make the effort to keep their software running on old unsupported OSs. There's a thriving community of new and existing XP users and I don't see it going away despite it being out of support for over a decade. It's one of the last great Windows versions and its long life ensured a huge software catalog is available for exploring, now including Principia.
I did a project on Windows 3.1 a few months back for fun. Borland C++ is still out there on abandonware websites.
What do people use XP for these days? I found it frustrating to use when it was new because of how often the system would lock up even on decent hardware (although being able to draw pictures with the frozen windows was sometimes fun). When 7 came out, I found that it usually ran better and froze less than XP even on XP era computers, although you'd have to upgrade your RAM.
I've seen some recent examples of XP in the wild, they pop-up occasionally in old ATMs, bus route displays, small stores running a PoS, etc. Not a recommended configuration of course but still happens nevertheless.
For me I enjoy it as a fun/hobby OS. I can install all my favorite tools and games and boot it up whenever. It's also fun to see what modern work can still be done on old OSs. Recent versions of PuTTY work so I can in theory sit on my XP box and drive LLM agents with Winamp playing in the background, chat on MSN with Escargot, etc.
I assume most people who use XP (which by default means non-hobbyists) are using it to run some software that was made to run only on it and the people who made said software never bothered to update the software for another OS. Something like a software application to manage prices in some family-run grocery store or warehouse in a former socialist country or what have you. The people using XP don't know they're even using an old OS, and they're oftentimes not very technical people (to say the least). They're using it because it's their job and they don't care particularly about it. It's usually not connected to the internet
Recently I went to the dentist, and while they weren't using XP, they were using Windows 7 to run some in-house software (I assume) to check my insurance
Yes, im from a former socialist country
"What do people use XP for these days?"
Hacking.
I currently have DX12 operating on XP-x64 (basically consumer 64-bit Win Server 2k3) with some minor hardware recognition issues. I have many modern games running this way. Many of them run much faster under XP than under their officially-supported OS (Win10+) which is an absolute shame.
That's interesting, how did you get that to work? I imagine you'd also need to somehow get device drivers for a newer graphics card to run (as well as for newer hardware in general if you don't want to be CPU bottlenecked). It seems like a lot of really cool work. Have you posted about this anywhere?
I've not used Windows in a very long time so forgive my ignorance, but I always heard that it was a bad idea to connect an XP machine to the internet because of the amount of malware sloshing about. In practice is that much of a problem for modern-day XP enthusiasts?
The kind of passive infection that is shown in popular videos like this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uSVVCmOH5w) tend to only happen if you hook up an XP machine to be directly accessible to the Internet. Like, if you connect your XP machine to your router sitting in the middle of your Internet connection and don't forward every port, you should be fine in that regard at least.
There is also Supermium which is a relatively recent version of Chromium backported to run on Windows XP with all the security patches that brings, but with that being said I still would not do anything security critical on it.
Yeah it was more of a problem back in the day when dial-up and DSL were more common, and home users would often have their computers directly connected to the internet if they didn't have multiple computers and a router. This was especially problematic before XP SP2 came out with the firewall enabled by default.