Comment by unethical_ban
4 hours ago
But... Old software is often going to be insecure on the network. Are you arguing that an OS from 2013 with a browser from the same time is fine on the Web?
4 hours ago
But... Old software is often going to be insecure on the network. Are you arguing that an OS from 2013 with a browser from the same time is fine on the Web?
Who's using a browser from 2013? When I said I'm running Windows 7, I'm specifically talking about the OS, including an awful lot of updates it's had since 2013, not all software I run on it. Updates added such things as support for the later versions of TLS, several years ago. Although Google and Mozilla have dropped official W7 support from Chrome and Firefox, there are forks that add it back, which is why I'm running up-to-date browsers.
If we were talking about even older browsers though... 20 years ago, because of the insecure way browsers generally worked, everybody used third-party antivirus or e.g. Norton Internet Security, which seemed to cause as many problems as it solved. But browsers (and OSes) haven't been so open for years - we don't have quite that class of problems anymore, where just visiting a site was enough to get the browser to download and run all sorts of nasties. I don't remember quite when it was that we'd left the most dangerous period behind, when the security of browsers and OSes had been considerably hardened, but it was before 2013. Windows 7 was, and is, much safer on the network than XP, by design.
Fair. As long as people are careful about what they're executing on the OS and it isn't arbitrarily exposed to the network it is less of a problem. My comment about browsers was due to me thinking that a lot of software stops building for old OS targets. I guess W7 is still getting modern support from vendors.
FWIW I'm running CachyOS and for the first time in my life have moved 95% away from Windows (still maintain a partition that I use every few weeks for a game that can't run on Proton). KDE 6.6 is a delight to use and everything "just works" for me, I don't have to worry about ungodly telemetry, and software fixes come in quickly.