What exactly is a "classic" desktop anyway? Are we talking classic Windows? Classic Mac OS? There's a constellation of UI paradigms which work. Some of them are mutually incompatible, you can't use them simultaneously. If you want to come up with something new, it has to actually work better than what we had before. If it merely works "as good" as what it's replacing then users won't be happy. You're changing things for the sake of change. So from those choices you pick the ones you think work best together and create a DE out of them. So we get Gnome Shell, KDE, XFCE, et al. Then there are the numerous eccentrics, throwbacks, and masochists running things like Awesome, DWM, Trinty, or any of the others which don't even add up to 1% all together.

I don't think Linux users are getting more pragmatic. The different camps have mostly just solidified around their own "classic" vision. There's 3-4 different main camps now depending how you choose to slice it, and numerous sub groups and forks if you drill down deeper. It'll always be more fragmented, contentious, and fluid than Windows or OS X. That's a good thing, as long as you have the wherewithal to navigate your way between all the various spin-offs and cousin projects spawned when the devs make a boneheaded change for change's sake. Gnome 2 users need to know enough that MATE is their upgrade path, etc.

I've actually been using Unity these days. It's level of polish and completeness is better than anything else I've found and it replicates the features I most enjoy from OS X. I had to install a less offensive theme and icon pack, change the system font to Lucida Grande, but after that it's a very nice desktop. I only have a few criticisms: you can't move the dock to the bottom; the search features aren't as simple and elegant as Spotlight, lenses are over-engineered and pointlessly complicated for what the achieve even if it's a more powerful tool overall; and there are a couple minor GUI glitches which I've come to find unacceptable after spending so much time in the pixel-perfect world Apple has created.

Windows NT was supported on ARM. As well as Alpha. I've still got a copy of it somewhere...

I did consider that but I have fileservers on my home network so I dont really want to add an AP with an older encryption scheme. NSA may or may not be peering thru' my firewall device but I'd rather not have any neighbourhood loon with AirCrack getting free internet and/or file access as well

Far older! Original Apple Airport cards are rebranded Lucent WaveLan / Orinoco Gold Card - basically a PCMCIA card, you could use the Lucent PCMCIA version in certain macs depending on the amount of available internal space (it was longer - My friend's old iMac had a Dell 1150 card in the airport slot and worked fine)

Mixed mode doesnt always work anyway - although its good to have it. Apple first-gen Airport cards cant connect to any 802.11n router whatever mode its in, they just wont do it. My fully functional grey&white 1st-gen iBook is a historic exhibit rather than a working spare machine now thanks to this.

I have an iBook - I always liked the look of the thing when it came out and around 2005 when it was no longer the current model, I bought a grey&white 366mhz, 10gb HDD iBook and the matching curve-shaped bag via eBay

Its had intermittent periods of use as and when I needed an extra machine, and although now 14 years old, with RAM upgraded to 392mb, an aftermarket battery giving 7 hours on a charge and OSX 10.3.9 installed, it still works. HOWEVER - it has an original Apple Airport card (probably worth more than the laptop & bag put together...) and these dont work with WPA2 or with any 802.11n router - they just wont connect.

So its just become a curiosity on the shelf - a machine with only one USB port is hopelessly compromised by using an external Wifi adapter.

Too expensive! Got a pair of Laptop 2.5 SATA HDDs in big plastic cases fitted inside my Dell desktop. Minimal performance loss compared to a 3.5 inch drive but so much quieter. Removed the optical drive completely and use an external USB2 drive as and when needed

And an O.B.E for services to humanity

We get tornadoes, just not often. Perhaps a few dozen a year - in my life I've only seen one once (I was driving at night and it crossed the road from one side to the other 100 yards in front of me - scared the crap out of me).

As a result they are much discussed over cups of tea when they occur. The national obsession with cats has made this the news story of the year

especially so if you buy one of the many chinese phones sold as carrier-own handsets in Europe (most made by ZTE) - pretty good average spec, much faster than an N900, better screens, fairly minimal Android installs

Its genuinely inappropriate for a menu to cover the entire screen

I hope that means a proper menu with expanding options off it - not the 'fuck you' compromise in Windows 8.1 where a 'start button' brings up the supershitty touch interface

the real trick is to start chrome browser, start Fabrice Bellard's javascript x86 virtual machine in Chrome, start Chrome OS on the VM, start Chrome on Chrome OS, then once you've got an infinite software defined hardware loop running, just unplug the physical hardware and put it away

In case some people don't RTFA,

Emphasis mine. XP updates ARE ending, but MSE/Forefront will still get updated. XP will still be susceptible to any zero day until it gets detected by MSE--if it's even installed at all. This is a marginal increase in safety for XP post-EOL, at best. The apocalypse is still nigh.

My advice for fellow ITAs. Don't mention this to your boss at all if you're still trying to migrate. It's not really relevant to the threat posed by XP's end of support. If they get wind of it on their own, emphasize that XP itself is still going to be wide open. At best all MSE does is let you know you've been owned after the fact once MS gets around to updating the definitions. MSE already has a pretty poor record for detecting even older threats. It's better than nothing but you shouldn't be relying on it.

It's theoretically possible that they don't bother submitting requests unless they are highly confident it will be accepted. I don't believe that, but it's at least possible. We need to know more about the process and the types of requests--unfortunately that's difficult with a secret court.