Running outdated software inside a virtual machine

Computing is driven by fast development in software and hardware. Software programmers are creating commits every day, new hardware is announced and shipped every week and each version is incompatible to the previous one. The disadvantage for the customer is, that a new installed software and a new hardware will become obsolete very soon in the future.

On the other hand there is a philosophy available to slow down the development and resist to change. To investigate this delayed strategy in detail we have to describe the situation first from a theoretical standpoint. The years measured on a time line are shown in the figure. The past, for example the year 2016, is shown left, while the now year is shown on the right. At first we investigate if its possible to install an outdated Linux distribution from 8 years ago on a computer and then we are using this software to browse in the internet To realize this technical experiment we are preferring a virtual machine instead of a physical to install Debian 7.11 from June 2016.[1]

The first message shown in the web browser is, that the internet connection is not secure. Something with the SSL certificate is wrong. The message can be deactivated but its a serious information that the browser is outdated.[2]

Next thing to do is to open a major website, which works surprisingly well. The online encyclopedia is rendered in the browser including all the images. Not bad, for an operating system which is 8 years old.[3]

Unfortunately, the largest video website isn't working with the old webbrowser. A message is shown “Your browser isn't supported anymore”. Even after tweaking the settings, the browser won't playback the videos.[4]

A rule of thumb is, that the browser shouldn't be older than 4 years to display all the content from the internet including videos, podcasts and social networking websites. This interval is shown in the time axis together with the other information.

The short experiment with a virtual machine has shown, that software has a short time span. Its impossible to use a webbrowser older than 4 years for any large website in the internet. Even if the user is happy with a certain operating system version, the Internet website requires a recent version, otherwise the service isn't working.

[1] qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -boot d -vga virtio -cdrom debian-live-7.11.0-amd64-gnome-desktop+nonfree.iso

[2] qemu1.webp

 [3] qemu2.webp

 [4] qemu3.webp