Why hasn't XP died yet

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I think they’re well aware that, no matter what they do, Linux will never be widely adopted in the desktop–laptop–tablet–whatever realm, unless this market itself shrinks into near-oblivion, catering only for the very sort of people who already use Linux. Meanwhile, most folks will always prefer Windows, no matter if it’s unsupported or pirated, or switch to Mac.

I still use windows XP alot of my stuff and also it has been dragged through the mud and alot of the bugs have been found and patched and also it is not being aimed for attack alot now because they have moved on to Windows 7 and Windows 8.

FYP:

I used RISC OS at school many years ago and thought it was a shame when x86 PCs took over that market share,, now however I run it on a Raspberry Pi as I don't have any old Acorn hardware, though right now I'm posting from a Dell Optiplex GX150 running Haiku (off topic, I know)

As of right now I believe the discontinuation of XP next year will put a lot of Pentium III/ AMD Athlon and early P4 systems in landfills. Flash Player already doesn't run on a old P3 desktop I have, thanks to Adobe making SSE2 a required feature to run Flash. In fact I had to download Flash Player 10 from the archives. Works but every website I go to it nags me about my Outdated Player.

Anything more powerful than an early model P4 or Athlon XP can run Linux or even Windows 7 anyways so probably won't see too many of them in landfills. Plus many of those systems still running XP will still support Flash Player. Support for Flash Player, Security Software and Modern Web Browsers are a must for a particular Computer or OS. Once a particular OS loses that market share will plummet. In fact I believe support for those types of programs are more important that MS discontinuing support for XP. Sure XP won't get any more updates next year, but by this point Microsoft has already ironed out most of the Security Flaws in the OS anyways. So in my Opinion support for Chrome, Firefox, Flash and Security programs are more important issue for XP than MS discontinuing support.

The only OS other than XP I can run reasonably on the P3 desktop are Crunchbang Linux and LXDE Debian. Even Lubuntu runs really crappy on it, Lubuntu is a light weight OS my foot.

You may also want to give the 1.x series of SolusOS a try instead of Lubuntu. SolusOS is essentialy Debian Squeeze with a 3.x series kernel, newer software, and Gnome 2.30 without any Compiz dependacies. Also, Desktop compositing can be completely turned off, and I've managed to strip it down to the point where the system consumes 70 mb RAM at login. --Mind you, this is with a full Gnome Desktop Environment!

This being said, of course, you will probably mave issues running Chrome, and current versions of Firefox, as they both hog CPU cycles, Opera doesn't consume as much CPU, but it takes up a lot of RAM when running lots of tabs, so you may have better luck running browsers such as Midori or Epiphany.

I like Midori, its a nice, basic browser. Used it on a Fedora system before.

I'd have to give SolusOS a try, thanks Fogman.

This is not a problem. A person on the SolusOS Forums also compiled a 3.8.4 kernel that seems run better than the default 3.3 or 3.4 kernel that ships with SolusOS. That being said, I've not used my SolusOS drive in about a month, as I'm using my Crunchbang install.

XP back in the days was far superior to any competing OS—and despite it's complexity, it was very stable. It's only flaw was that it wasn't particularly backwards compatible.

Linux is an excellent NOS, but for private consumers, it's highly overrated. You won't get the infamous blue screen of death, but you'll still get to see the image freeze a fair share of times or experience kernel panic every now and then. It may also tell you out of the blue one day you turn your computer on that it can't find your GPU (despite the fact that it could yesterday)—which will in turn mean that the OS needs to be reinstalled. Because it won't let you decide where to place stuff without putting up a fight, it'll also place whatever is installed via the terminal on a miniature partition when there's plenty of space elsewhere. This can be changed in the terminal, but this is not user friendly enough for the common man.

Lastly, there's the matter of compatibility; while Wine can run word processors or simple graph tools smoothly, it can't run games or advanced 3D modelling tools particularly well. The former is found pretty much on every family computer across the globe.

If everybody switched to Linux, viruses would switch to Linux as well. Given that Windows 95 and Windows XP made home computers what they are today (cheap and with good access to the internet), I doubt there are many genuine Microsoft atheists out there. The billions used for development are actually spent quite wisely.

Because XP is still the greatest Windows ever made thus far. I'm still using XP because I like how it's not as bloated as later Windows versions and I can free it from all unneeded services and such with relative ease.

I only moved from XP to 7 because I needed support for fancy new hardware (DX 11, SSD, 64 bit and other newceties). But I miss the performance lost.

Many of my new hardware doesn't even have drivers for XP.

But lot of people didn't bought new hardware, and as long as his old machine runs, they are happy.

Also, for many causes, no much new software is incompatible with XP so there is no reason to upgrade.

When was the last time you used Linux? Much of this was true a long time ago, but none of these downsides you mention (except some Windows-only games & 3D apps, yes) have existed for at least 5 years. I have been using various Linux distros as my primary OS' for almost 3 years now, and I have hit kernel panic on a stable distro exactly once. It rebooted fine, too. Also, most people do not need to run "word processors" in Wine, since Libreoffice is better than MS Word for most people and runs natively. There are also enough Linux-native games to keep most casual gamers happy. And although wider adoption would bring more virus writers to Linux, the Linux system is inherently more security-aware, especially with the open-source development. There are a few hundred Linux viruses that have been created - none were ever a serious threat because the vulnerabilities they exploited were found, and often patched, before the viruses were released.

The optimal path for a computer user is XP -> some noob-friendly Linux distro, skipping buggy Vista, slow Win7, and the travesty of pre-installed spyware that is Win8.

Not to mention Real Geeks™ prefer TeX

I think it's also because there a lot more things that you can do with a sound card in XP, as they removed a lot of the sound card features from Vista, like the hardware acceleration of sound.

I've still got an old XP tower system. XP will live on that machine as long as the machine itself continues to work. I don't tend to "upgrade" Windows versions, just keep the one that came with the machine.