>>>I think what gives VFP safety is that the world is full to the brim with 32bit apps which must be supported or risk losing a gigantic number of users.
>
>That's the same point Craig Boyd used to make in his keynote speeches. People use apps, not operating systems so an OS that isn't compatible with the apps, is a bad OS.
There's also the question of the ecosystem of apps built on DOS/Windows bugs, which would stop working when/if these were fixed. The apps like that are quickly becoming history.
I have a little Acer AspireOne netbook which I use only for reading and making notes - so, no multimedia, no surfing (as the wireless never worked), just an isolated little machine for limited use. It had XP.sp3 on it, which worked more or less reliably. Small trouble (like settings in notepad++ being partially lost every now and then, so I'd have unreadable color combination in the current row) recently became larger, as I once accidentally rotated the screen and then didn't know which combination was pressed; when I found the video card's applet it would work but would go back to rotated when I'd get back to the XP's applet. And it wouldn't go into standby mode anymore, so I had a choice of booting every time or waiting for it to hybernate (which never finished, so boot it is).
I got fed up and put linux mint on a stick. The download, setting up the stick, trial run and install took altogether two hours. And voila, it suspends properly without any need for special settings; the fonts look much better; it wakes up from suspension in 4 seconds; the wireless works immediately and without any special setup. The Calibre's reader app that I'm using looks exactly the same as under Windowses (tried it under 7 and XP) and it downloaded at about 400 KB/s - over that wireless which never worked.
And these apps which are not just ported, but built for several OSes at the same time, are winning the day. Why would anyone worry about whether Office is working right, or at all, on their other machine's OS, when LibreOffice works on all of them?
