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Windows XP Dies Final Death As Embedded POSReady 2009 Reaches End of Life (techrepublic.com)
New submitter intensivevocoder shares a report from TechRepublic: Extended support for Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 -- the last supported version of Windows based on Windows XP -- ended on April 9, 2019, marking the final end of the Windows NT 5.1 product line after 17 years, 7 months, and 16 days. Counting this edition, Windows XP is the longest-lived version of Windows ever -- a record which is unlikely to be beaten.
Despite the nominal end of support for Windows XP five years ago, the existence of POSReady 2009 allowed users to receive security updates on Windows XP Home and Professional SP3 through the use of a registry hack. Microsoft dissuaded users from doing this, stating that they "do not fully protect Windows XP customers," though no attempt was apparently made to prevent users from using this hack. With POSReady reaching the end of support, the flow of these security updates will likewise come to an end.
Despite the nominal end of support for Windows XP five years ago, the existence of POSReady 2009 allowed users to receive security updates on Windows XP Home and Professional SP3 through the use of a registry hack. Microsoft dissuaded users from doing this, stating that they "do not fully protect Windows XP customers," though no attempt was apparently made to prevent users from using this hack. With POSReady reaching the end of support, the flow of these security updates will likewise come to an end.
Why would this amount to 'death'? If I had, for an example, a LabView system on my bench that ran on Windows XP, it wouldn't need to 'die' because it isn't networked to any other systems. There are lots of pieces of test equipment that embed various versions of Windows in them. At a previous job we had Unholtz-Dicke shaker tables. One had a Windows XP host, the other had a Windows 2000 host. They worked fine. They will continue to work fine.
Time for a big compatibility rant:
32-bit Windows 10 can still run most 16-bit Windows 3.0 binaries no problem out of the box. 64-bit Windows can run 32-bit binaries no problem with stuff dating as far back as Windows 95 working just fine. The community has adapted winevdm to work on Windows (otvdm) for running 16-bit binaries on 64-bit Windows 7 and above transparently, however, compatibility requires a bit of Wine-style work like nabbing old 16-bit DLLs for otvdm to work as it’s still early days. I can run the Windows 3.1 Control Panel and change the actual wallpaper in Windows 10 using it. That is how backwards compatible Windows is. For reference, Office 97 still works on 64-bit Windows 10 in 2019 without issues - yet StarOffice binaries for Linux fail on modern Linux distros.
On Linux, the kernel team do a fantastic job of keeping userland compatibility but the distribution-maintained userland compatibility sucks donkeys. Simple commands like head and tail have compatibility broken by the GNU project for scripting, leading old video games like Unreal Tournament failing to install without environment variable changes and hacks. Likewise, commands keep changing for the heck of it, as do the interfaces for system configuration. A group policy written for Windows 2000 will still mostly work for Windows 10. A mandatory sabayon policy for RHEL 5 does not work in RHEL 7 a few years later and with some settings having no equivalents, meaning one can’t lock down the desktop GUI any more. Likewise, a Software Restriction Policy in Windows XP will still work on Windows 10, yet SELinux backwards compatibility gets repeatedly changed in incompatible ways (first, more modularity, then boolean name changes, then removal of some policy enforcement breaking custom modules....), this means system administrators often don’t bother locking down Linux systems as much as they should outside of what is spoon fed by the distribution default policy set.
Audio: try RealPlayer for Windows.(even in Wine), then try RealPlayer for Linux. One stack retained full backwards compatibility for standard audio features, the other fubared a lot of proprietary apps.
Graphics: Try running original Quake 3 Arena binaries on Linux so that you can have PunkBuster and such, then try on Windows. One OS works around the buffer overflow caused by OpenGL Extension count, the other leaves the user SOL.
Networking: The RPC layer for networking allows one to use tools like Computer Management on Windows XP to maintain Windows 10 and vice-versa, ditto for the registry without needing to remote on and run commands directly on the host. 18 years of both forwards and backwards compatibility in Windows case.
I could go on but it’s safe to say Linux does not have anywhere near decent backwards compatibility. Not because of the kernel but because of distributions and developers not putting in the extra work to maintain backwards compatibility.
They say it's dead, but you can still download a free, fully functional 32-bit version of XP encased in a virtual machine (Windows Virtual PC) from Microsoft's web site! It's called "Windows XP Mode."
Commodore 64 had at least three different versions of its underlying ROM, and upgrades were a thing. It was a whole different ball of wax back then, but they existed.