The newest Linux Mint -
Main Page - Linux Mint - is so slick that there are few excuses for staying with XP, particularly for ordinary users.
It's businesses that have to bite the bullet - so many will have to upgrade machines and rewrite clunky old in-house software that depends on XP's idiosyncrasies.
Windows 7 is fine if you can still find a copy - the big misery is the confusing/irritating Windows 8 interface that MS is likely to persist with.
Happily, individual users can install Classic Shell -
http://sourceforge.net/projects/classicshell/ - but this isn't so easy in a corporate environment (and neither is Linux, unless you happen to have a very switched on business).
I suspect that Chrome OS (and to a lesser extent OS X) are the real future as cloud storage and W3C start to bite.
Mac
