Still using Windows XP

Support for Windows XP ended in 2014 ^🗄️, thus as of today nearly 6 years passed, and still, I’m still using it from time to time.

End of support means that no updates will be provided, security bugs won’t get fixed, and developers probably will not provide applications for it.

Nevertheless, in a constrained environment, like a virtual machine without an internet connection, I found it very useful.

My first use case in 2020 was the following.

I had to fill out a PDF document. PDF is an open format since 2008, it is well supported by many operating systems and applications, on Wikipedia you can find a list of programs and libraries for viewing, creating and interacting with pdf files.

While the PDF standard is not that complex, even if it has some tricky parts, unfortunately, it can embed a lot of content, for example, PDF files, Fonts, Images, Binary blobs, digital signatures, XML(!), and Javascript code to be executed(!!!).

Especially the two last points make PDF documents a complex data type to parse, render, and edit correctly.

The document I had to fill did not render correctly in Firefox, because it had some XFA forms. It’s a known issue that such file types exist, and most readers I tried do not support (or fully support), those types of documents.

The documents display a nice text message

But there is no client for Linux systems, except for Android.

Of course, I could have complained to those who gave me the PDF document, convincing them that PDF is a not-so-ideal standard, stories about vendor lock-ins, intereoperability with different programs, and the fact that a simple .txt file would have sufficed for our needs. Or, instead of complaining, I could have downloaded and tested more readers, but my time was limited, and I had to fill out this document.

As Adobe Reader would have surely supported the PDF file, I tried installing it with WINE, but as reported in WINEHQ, some workarounds are necessary even with the latest version.

So I opted for a bulletproof solution: to virtualize Windows.

My computer can run VirtualBox with Windows 10 on it, but looking at the minimum system requirements ^🗄️ (at least 32 GB disk space and 1 GB ram, which in my experience is not enough if you do not want to wait all the time), they are considerably high for just viewing and filling a PDF file. Especially since if I’m executing the virtual machine, I need to pay some attention, as running too many programs will saturate my RAM.

As a comparison, the recommended (not minimal) system requirements for Windows XP ^🗄️ are 128 MB memory and 1.5 GB disk space.

These requirements are of course exaggerated for a PDF viewer (maybe not the RAM requirements, but the disk surely), but not so much for a platform for letting the PDF viewer (and possibly other programs) run.

Now the crucial question. Can I run Adobe Reader on Windows XP, as the system has been discontinued 6 years ago?

No, the current version of Adobe Reader does not support Windows XP. But the previous one, Adobe Reader XI, does. This version is not supported anymore since 2017 ^🗄️, but it can still be downloaded from the official site.

Long story short.

It is not the first time I had to resort to Windows to accomplish some tasks, but most of the time I just use the current version. The same holds for the program I want to use, normally I just pick the latest version available. But in this case, using unsupported versions of Windows has been a good idea.

Hopefully, alternative programs like native programs for Linux, or the embedded reader in the browser will catch up. Maybe software like WINE or ReactOS will permit me to use Windows Applications without using Windows, but in the meantime, I can still use the original Windows operating system.

After this experiment, I expect that many times, an older version of some program is sufficient for most needs. Of course, supporting an "antique" operating system is not a high priority in most projects, but it has its advantages. Compared to the latest Windows version, its system requirements are so low that it could run on a Raspberry PI (someone did it), which makes possible to run Windows Programs on very tiny and cheap platforms, without necessarily porting the program to GNU/Linux.

Supporting even older versions of Windows, like Windows 95 and Windows 98, would require even fewer resources from the end user, but much more while developing the program, and as already stated: there are not so many use cases that might be relevant for the Software developers.