mockingbird wrote on 2025-01-06, 13:18:

dionb wrote on 2025-01-06, 06:59:

In terms of performance and software capabilities maybe, but in terms of security: absolutely not. XP is new enough to run contemporary malware but out of support so defenceless against it. Whether you want to use it for retro builds is up to you (the fact 32b WinXP still can run 16b code means you can run old Win3.x things on it; also it still supports hardware accelerated positional audio, which is also a valid retro use case) but please don't use XP for daily work.

I don't want to sound disputatious but I have to disagree. I was using XP as a daily driver up until a few months ago... The only reason I switched is because of the memory limitations and needing many tabs open in a browser.

In other words, security was not an issue.

N=1

Security is an issue, you got lucky - possibly helped by sensible behaviour - but that doesn't stop it being a risk. Particularly as specifically the things that OSs get patched against are exploits that don't rely on user input. Idiots clicking every link can easily get Windows 11 infected, the risk with unpatched vulnerabilities is that you can get hit even if you don't do anything wrong.