Mixed feelings about software

I mean, support for Windows 7 ended on January 14, 2020 (for end users). Now even the extended (paid) support for companies is over (actually that already happened in January). No surprise Mozilla doesn't want to deal with that OS any longer.

Axios And I started to think is linux going be more stable in this respect.

I think there's more than way to skin a horse or however that goes. Hang in there. I would want to keep W7 as long as I could too.

From what I've seen recently on the FF site, FF plans to pull the plug on Windows 7 and 8 by the 3rd quarter of next year. (I think Vivaldi already has.) About a year later, Windows 10 will be EOL, and Windows users may be faced with the same problem all over again. To me, it isn't worth the perpetual hassle.

About ten years ago I found it interesting that some of my web design customers (business owners) were still using Windows 2000 and NT, and, still daily accessing the Internet with the old PCs. That was one of the reasons for why they hired me for the web work - they needed a website that could be viewed by their own computers, as well as by their customers' computers that were often as old.

One customer's business served large industries, and apparently I was the only web developer in town who could code a website for older browsers. (My being firsthand familiar with their types of industrial products and services was also a big plus.)

A lot of the old software was ideal, but new versions do not exist for newer OSes, and so if a person needs a specific program to accomplish a specific task, then an old OS is necessary. The point here is that a lot of people will continue to use Windows 8, 7, Vista, XP, 2000, NT, 98, and 95 for as long as humanly possible, and to heck with caring whether a browser is updated or not (just keep hard drive clones handy). I myself would have continued using W2K if it had had decent graphics drivers for the then-new LCD monitors.

Axios
Fully agreed. I built my wife and I two computers each, one for offline and one for online. My wife has over 40 years of researched data that can only be used with XP. We don't care what we use for online access (email and downloads) because we don't store any important files on the online PCs.

To me, if procutivity software is connected to the Internet, I do my best to either block it with the firewall, or not use it at all.

Axios
Yeah, that looks good! Windows 8.1 has a similar setup where I can create rules to deny inbound and outbound connections to specific programs and features. I too would love to see it on Solus!

Just a grumpy FYI, some time back I caught MS Word attempting to call-home with a packet that included a document's text that had passwords and copyrighted data. Windows' settings were supposed to prevent Word from calling home, but the settings of course made no difference. If the doc had had sensitive data (i.e. maximum security passwords for customers (site logins, banks' security systems, city-county-state agencies, etc.) wow that would have been horrible! Firewalls are great, but I still can't trust them for important stuff. Pen and paper remain the best security.

LarryNG

Pen and paper remain the best security.

Especially in password management

Axios If you ever had a house break in (as I have) it pales in comparison

everything is small potatoes after terror like that my friend. understand.

right now I'm finally happy. no pen and paper. a file on the hdd with the passwords. and I back that up. and I cut and paste from it when logging in. no cloud, no browser extensions that do listen at open ports because that's their cue to recognize the login and do the auto-fill in. I was comfortable with that for a long time and one I thought..."hey, wait a minute...."

brent "someone can break in your house and take it or photograph it" so I stopped making that argument.

If someone has access to your house they can also use the "hit you with a heavy wrench and politely ask" method of password retrieval. Then it doesn't matter whether you wrote them down on paper, or stored them in a digital database.

From the pulled out of my butt category, wouldn't it be possible to create a program to run a sandboxed browser on something like Win 7?

I get security concerns and updated web standards, but the whole having to scrap the entire OS just to browse the web (even if with limited fuctionality) just seems so stupid to me.

What am I missing?

You wouldn't need to create a program. Just spend a few minutes and create a virtual machine. Every VM I've ever created includes a browser, usually a popular one. Assuming you use Solus, you could create a VM that's the same edition as its host and uses the same browser, so everything would be familiar to you.

WetGeek Point me in the direction of how to do this in Solus to run something like W10?

Thanks in advance.

qsl Point me in the direction of how to do this in Solus to run something like W10?

VirtualBox is in the repository. You'll probably want the one for the current kernel, so at the command line, just ask for eopkg it virtualbox-current (or find it in the Software Center). Using it is pretty simple, but usually requires a tutorial for folks who are using it for the first time. I wrote one of those a couple of years ago, but I've been thinking of writing a new one for VirtualBox 7.

I should do that tomorrow, so if you want to get the software and take a look around, I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have. I happen to have a friend who would benefit greatly from VMs, but I haven't yet convinced him to try using them. Maybe an updated tutorial would convince him.

You start with an .ISO file. You can get one for Windows 10 online from microsoft.com -- just search for it.
Then, you create a virtual disk drive, which is nothing more than a file. You define the properties your VM will have, and give it the virtual disk to install on and select the .ISO file to install on it. From there on, it's just like installing it on hardware.

Yes, you can have a Win 10 VM. A Windows 10 VM will come with the Edge browser already installed, but you can typically install any program on a VM that you can install on hardware, so if you prefer a different browser, just install it.