"The best analogy in the Windows world for systemd is the Win95 registry..."

The Windows registry was designed to make it very, very difficult for people to make copies of software to use on another computer. The Windows registry was intentional obfuscation, and very much against the needs of users, because of the huge amounts of time it takes to understand and fix problems with the registry.

A comment below says, "SystemD is RedHat's version of embrace and extend." That seems a better explanation. The way it is being done is certainly deliberate. Starting a big hassle that damages the reputation of Linux is certainly against the needs of the users.

It seems that the entire U.S. culture is becoming more adversarial. For example, there are health care insurance policies that are written in such a way that the insured will not understand that they aren't being fully covered.

Companies are deliberately over-billing. Many people cannot afford the time to find all the ways they are being treated badly.

First step: Make providers publish their prices on a government web site, and actually charge those prices. Have big fines for charging more. That would help prevent over-billing.

In 2008, banks arranged bank failures that caused job loss. That allowed companies to fire 10% of their staff and make the other 90% do the work because the 90% were afraid they would lose their jobs, also.

People are so overworked that they don't feel they have time to investigate over-billing. Companies take advantage of that by being as difficult as possible. It's deliberate dishonesty and becoming a standard way U.S. companies do business.

(I imagine that English is a 2nd language for the parent commenter.)

"... couple other extensions..."

What other extensions restore Firefox to the previous usability? Most people don't have the time to search.

Pale Moon x64 is Firefox with adult supervision.

Firefox is becoming less and less stable. It's so unstable that it often doesn't report crashes, so the crash reports aren't reliable, they show far fewer crashes than actually occurred.

The underlying problem is that Mozilla Foundation needs better management. At present, Mozilla Foundation management is sometimes excellent and sometimes very unreliable.

Mod parent up! It's something many people would like to read.

In many cases, XP vulnerabilities are minimal. Don't use Internet Explorer. Every user should have limited rights. Users should be trained not to open files that haven't been arranged in advance. Use a software firewall that monitors outgoing traffic.

Most writers for technical publications have limited technical knowledge. What is not said in the article linked by Slashdot is that computers that run software firewalls that monitor outgoing traffic are far more protected.

Quoting from the article: "For this attack scenario to be successful, the user must be convinced to open the specially crafted file containing the malicious OLE object. All Microsoft Office file types as well as many other third-party file types could contain a malicious OLE object."

Another quote: "A successful exploitation could lead to the attacker gaining same user rights as the current user, and if that means administrative user rights, the attacker can install programs; access, modify, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights."

This article explains some of the issues: Microsoft Windows XP "end of life": Conflict of interest.