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posted by janrinok on Sunday April 06 2014, @08:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-not-the-year-of-the-Linux-desktop dept.

A recent poll by The Inquirer asked, "Which operating system will you use after Windows XP support ends on 8 April?"

Among respondents, 33 percent said they will move to Windows 7, 17 percent will stick with XP, 13 percent will switch to Linux, 11 percent will get Windows 8, and 5 percent said OS X.

So most will switch to Windows 7, but many would rather stay with Win XP without support than switch to Linux.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by jasassin on Sunday April 06 2014, @11:03PM

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Sunday April 06 2014, @11:03PM (#27200) Homepage Journal

    To be fair, it's simply logical to stay on XP or move to 7. All your software will still work and the learning curve is minimal.

    I agree with you. I would love to run Linux, but the driver support doesn't work as well for me as Windows 7. I sincerely hope by the time Windows 7 EOL's there will be something more amazing than we can imagine now. The answer might be Wayland, but the problem I see is a whole group of buggy incompatible compositors. Maybe they'll have that all figured out by 7's EOL.

    --
    jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @12:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @12:14AM (#27216)

    I agree with you
    I don't. After the final Patch Tuesday, XP should only be used air-gapped.
    Expect a whole raft of exploits that are being held back to be turned loose shortly after the 8th.
    You can expect to be another node on the latest botnet before you can turn around and spit.

    Linux[...]driver support doesn't work as well for me as Windows 7
    Stop buying crappy hardware from crappy manufacturers with crappy support.

    -- gewg_

    • (Score: 1) by monster on Monday April 07 2014, @07:04AM

      by monster (1260) on Monday April 07 2014, @07:04AM (#27312) Journal

      So your solution to bad drivers is going backwards in time to buy some other hardware?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @10:24PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 07 2014, @10:24PM (#27826)

        I assume that at the time the GP bought his kit, the reputation for a lack of support for that gear was common knowledge.
        People who buy single-purpose gear then whine when that doesn't work outside those narrow bounds get no empathy from me--only scorn.

        Standard practice to determine if the gear that has caught your eye is open/compatible is to take your bootable ISO with you to BuyMore.

        Boot-to-a-usable-desktop media has been available all of this century.
        (Anyone who isn't aware how far back KNOPPIX goes has been living in a cave.)
        Indeed, this meme goes back to the Lose95 era. [googleusercontent.com] (orig[1]) [linuxjournal.com] ...and even before. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [wikipedia.org]

        The ultimate form of this test is to use a doesn't-support-any-closed-code distro for that. [soylentnews.org]
        That distro is called Trisquel.

        [1] The significant text for your text search is Fall '95.

        -- gewg_

        • (Score: 1) by monster on Tuesday April 08 2014, @07:11AM

          by monster (1260) on Tuesday April 08 2014, @07:11AM (#28012) Journal

          Usually it's not so simple. When you buy new hardware it's common to go near the 'bleeding edge', at least in some components. Many times the hardware isn't supported at that moment, but gets a driver later (we have to assume it, Linux is a second class citizen for many companies, specially on consumer hardware). In those cases you are betting that your hardware will get the drivers you need, but you really don't know. If later the company decides to not support Linux properly you are screwed, but you had no way to know it before.

          Also, company reputation for support is not always the same. Take HP, for example: Their old printers worked flawlessly with Linux, with many of them you could send a PS file to it and call it done. Then, new models arrive and the support is somewhere between defective and half-assed, like the HPLIP ones, or the drivers are crippled and don't support all the functionalities of the printers.