For me, XP is what drove me to Linux full-time. (Later, a bit of Mac OS X on the desktop, when I could afford the hardware.) But I've always kept a toe in the Windows pie, the tool that, after MS-DOS, built my career.
Win11 makes me almost nostalgic for Win10. But Win10 is a sad crippled thing, it's just that you're allowed to prune it back hard. (Removing all Modern apps, for instance.) Do that to 11, it dies.
But using Win10 for a couple of hours a year is enough.
Recently a friend bemoaned being forced to move to Win10 because 7 wasn't getting updates and drivers, and apps were no longer working. So I tried a couple of fresh installs. It's so much better it's not funny; it's sad.
So I reached back and put XP64 on an old spare Core 2 Duo. It flies along. It's so snappy and responsive and so lightweight. It will run, not usefully but functionally, in 64MB of RAM. Pruned down hard it takes about 50MB. It doesn't fill a CD.
I am now idly considering trying Windows 2000 on my lowest-end functional laptop.
Not inherently, no. I haven't daily-driven Windows in years, either.
But that wasn't really what the post was about. It was about the smugness of trying to gotcha the parent with a caveat that hasn't been valid for a decade.
