Old Machines and XP for Linux(not really a D topic)

[John Colvin]

On Friday, 28 February 2014 at 04:31:01 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
> I was in a discussion here recently about 64 bit and how much 
> memory people had in their machines these days.
>
> A somewhat unrelated topic is that Microsoft are in the process 
> of dumping XP.
>
> Now all those old desktop boxes with only 500k of memory will 
> increasingly migrate in containers to Africa, like the 
> discarded mountain bikes, and old banger cars. When they get 
> here they have traditionally had XP installed, since that is 
> readily available for free - legal or not.
>
> Microsoft might do itself a favour in the long term if instead 
> of just dumping XP, it started from the Wine code, and made an 
> XP lookalike Linux distro. That way, the old boxes would have 
> an extended life, Microsoft would have goodwill from a lot of 
> users, and would not have to spend a lot of money keeping the 
> old OS, the spammers would be blocked in their process of 
> taking over all those unprotected XP machines, and lots of 
> young African girls and boys could learn to program in D ;=)
>
> Steve

Perhaps of interest:
http://www.reactos.org/
http://zorin-os.com/