XP is still in use for 2 reasons: cost and backwards compatibility.
For cost, CentOS, on it's own, is free. Support costs you of course, but the updates are coming down from RedHat for which there is enough money flowing in already, so support in this case means a sysadmin who understands CentOS and those are not that rare, not even that expensive.
Backwards compability is another topic, especially with the rise of systemd.
If the corresponding software is not included in any official or semi-official repositories (EPEL, for example), but is distributed with source, you may need someone to recompile it every 11 years, when you change mayor versions. I think this is reasonable to expect, though there might be issues for certain, especially if it involves Gnome3.
For those that are distributed without source code - well, that is the same problem as with XP, but usually it's possible to strace why it fails and fix/replace/dosomemagic with the underlying libraries it's depending on.
When this is not possible you can still create a container image with the old code to run it with.
With all the power out there even in the office workstations we could:
- install a base, damn stupid linux as hypervisor
- run windows in virtualbox with shared folders
- use btrfs for the shared folders and keep daily snapshots for a few weeks
If you get a virus, drop the image, get a new one, restore the snapshot, done.
If anyone is already using something like this, please tell, I'm curious.
> Backwards compability is another topic, especially with the rise of systemd.
User level ABI has had no important incompatibility since the glibc released with the kernel 2.6 (don't remember the version). That was some 15 years ago. Most applications didn't even break at that time, and core libraries promise more stability now.
That's nothing similar to the compatibility break between Windows XP and Vista. That transition broke most of the older applications, at the kernel level.
> That's nothing similar to the compatibility break between Windows XP and Vista. That transition broke most of the older applications, at the kernel level.
First i hear of this, so MS did a damn good job of papering over it.
The only Windows breakage on the software level i have noticed is the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit, and that has more to do with CPU modes than Windows internals.
But i keep battling crazy dependencies and odd breakages related to desktop software on Linux. Never mind that devs keep reinventing the wheel (how many VFS implementations have Gnome gone through now? 3? 4?).
