Johnathanamz: Anyone else still use one or the other? And will continue to do so for many, many more years?
Yes, many are running W7 on its own or dual-booting with Linux.
"OMG, on Jan 15th 2020, your PC will get hacked, your house will burn down, and goblins will eat your children if you connect to the net with W7" is the same silly hysteria it was when the world didn't end on April 8th, 2014 for XP users. It's still possible to buy new hardware that's W7 compatible (as previously
mentioned in detail here). Intel's Coffee Lake refresh, AMD Ryzen CPU's, nVidia Turing, etc, all work perfectly on W7 with official signed drivers available much to MS's chagrin.
As for W7 security vs common sense, I
posted about that here too. If you don't download iffy files, have a decent web browser with ad-blocker and change the firewall from default blacklist (allow all outgoing connections, block by exception) to a whitelist one (block all outgoing connections, allow by exception), you've already made your PC more secure than W10's defaults which chatter, chatter, chatter online all the time (both itself and its
"allow all programs unrestricted outgoing net access" defaults).
It's amazing how many people still can't wrap their heads around the fact that W10's firewall defaults (which almost no-one changes) plus non-disabled services like "Secondary Login", "Remote Registry", etc, are insecure by design, or that many of the bulk database hacks (where millions of passwords got swiped at once) were running Windows Server 2016 / 2019 (with the same shared code-base as W10...) An up to date web browser + properly secured firewall + common sense like not reusing the same password across all sites, two-factor login especially for banking, etc, matters about 100,000x more than the OS version.
