For me separating "important" stuff into an airgapped small net is refreshing. No worry that printing will be killed by a patch day, intruder will caper your router from the outside, a driveby surfing will harm anything important. WinXP gives spiffy VMs running under 10GB disc and 512..1024MB RAM besides some Linux playgrounds. Important is the app, which should run as it did in the middle nineties under MS-DOS, PC-DOS, NT command, OS/2, shelled back from Windows 98...
Browsing, Email and nowadays PDF editing delegated to internet-connected Linuxes - thorn is tax programs needing internet access as such filing is required by our IRS. On different companies 2 different programs and another cheap one for myself - all of them not running smoothly under Linux - some needing WINE, others PlayOnLinux and still having problems with the often necessary updates. Will keep one relatively current Windows for them, but otherwise.

Also considering to even drop WinWord (even my old, blindingly fast 97) in favor of switching over to markdown editing. Most of the stuff today is NOT printed anymore, but sent as attachment. Having seen the light of version control in program files, I want that benefit for "written text" as well - hello markdown, lets see how far I can get with a few layouts to print my texts and letters in if and where necessary. Reminiscent of MS Word for Dos or the stuff on C64, but goodby proprietary text file formats...

regards
thomas

>>The stuff in my airgapped net recently grew 2 XP VM again (no chance of internet infection, nearly as tiny as a linux VM footprint without the hassle of installing WINE). I have no real need for W11 - Android apps loading might be nice, but no real motivation for me to buy new machines. W11 *not* running inside VM would certainly spur me more into Dragans POV moving even more away from offerings needing latest Seattle OS. Back to basics...
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>Basics? On the contrary, I'm doing everything I want on this mint box. The only two things that run under wine are vfp (the few pet projects left over and not willing to waste time porting) and, ahem, AcdSee from 1998, because when it rotates an image, it stays rotated no matter what is displaying it. I could have done it with Gimp, but it's too complicated - I open a jpeg, then have to export it (!), because its specific form of autism considers save done only if it's into some xcf format; it has no set safe off so I have to press enter three times in various dialogs, and in the end when I want to close the image I need to click ignore, because when jpeg is exported as jpeg I consider it saved, Gimp doesn't.
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>And that's all. All my browsers, image processing, database (postgres), games, media players, spreadsheet, editors - it's all linux native, simple, doesn't change defaults with every update, doesn't require any registration, it just works. I even reinstalled the OS three times in one afternoon (not realizing it was OK the first time) and guess what, nothing was forgotten, I was still owner of whatever I was before, even my game scores and window positions were saved (including software I had to reinstall - still had its settings preserved). Comparing that to scorched earth installations of windowses is like comparing gentle massage with bludgeon on the head.
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>W11 makes me, therefore happy - there goes another one which will be no problem to me :).