Windows 11

[RailGooner]

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It's quite possible to keep a 10 year old PC running well, securely and free of charge but it requires some effort on the users part i.e. you need to install and learn how to use Linux and possibly make some changes to the software you use. Although there's nothing stopping you running Windows and any required software as a virtual PC on Linux (I do this so I can use Affinity) and keep that VM disconnected from the Internet to keep it safe.

Linux Mint is excellent, the average Windows user will have no problems learning how to use it.

Let's compare apples with apples. If the Linux distro is ten years old and unpatched... !

[NScaleNotes]

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It's quite possible to keep a 10 year old PC running well, securely and free of charge but it requires some effort on the users part i.e. you need to install and learn how to use Linux and possibly make some changes to the software you use. Although there's nothing stopping you running Windows and any required software as a virtual PC on Linux (I do this so I can use Affinity) and keep that VM disconnected from the Internet to keep it safe.

Linux Mint is excellent, the average Windows user will have no problems learning how to use it.

Let's compare apples with apples. If the Linux distro is ten years old and unpatched... !

I think you might misunderstand, I'm not advocating running a 10 year old unpatched Linux distro because you don't need to. What I'm pointing out is Linux usually has much lower hardware requirements so you can run a cutting-edge OS release and up to date software on older equipment. Of course there are limits to this, I've noticed a more and more open-source software is no longer supporting 32-bit hardware.

But if you really want to compare apples to apples, I reckon 10 year old unpatched Linux would still be safer than 10 year old unpatched Windows. That's partly technical, it's not quite the same as it is with Windows where Microsoft builds everything, in Linux you tend to have an OS built using components from multiple independent developers which can all be updated independently as and when it is required. So you're unlikely to have a completely unpatched system, certain parts of the whole might depreciate and be unpatched but other parts wouldn't. It's also partly to do with less attackers focusing on Linux machines and partly to do with it being open-source i.e. the developers don't hide their code so the community finds problems quicker than closed source equivalents. Yes, exploits are still discovered/developed and rootkits could theoretically be a problem but I don't get anywhere near the problems I used to get when running Windows.