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A question that always generates calm and reasonable discussion: What OS do you use? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 149 comments | Search Discussion
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:44PM (#224605)

    Zorin 9

    An LTS release, supported till April 2019. Very impressive--especially when you realize that it's essentially the work of a pair of brothers.
    Its top cheerleader may be Dmitry Kaglik aka DarkDuck. [google.com]
    He's also had a bunch of guest writers who have raved about Zorin as well.

    automatically finds the really old proprietary wireless drivers

    The Wary Puppy spin [google.com] is another distro that gets mentioned when the topic is support for very old hardware.
    (If every distro included every device ever supported by the Linux kernel, ISOs would get very big very quickly; somebody has to draw the line somewhere.)

    available for week-long checkout

    This is the part I saw as novel.
    As I haven't seen such a thing here in SoCal, I was curious about the location and the nature of the entity sponsoring this tech effort / citizen convenience.
    Maybe a county that has embraced the FOSS ethos because of a concentration of tech employers?
    A sizable college town in Oregon that has discovered how cost-effective/annoyance-free FOSS licensing is?
    A neighborly little New England village that invests in its people?

    When it is turned in, it gets sanitized and restored

    How many units now? How big a support staff? Expected growth?
    Will it be a turnkey thing [google.com] that can be accomplished by e.g. a librarian with no tech chops?

    When this gets into high gear, I'm hoping that page gets built.
    We hear about the schools in Penn Manor running FOSS and about Extremadura converting 80,000 machines of its public infrastructure to all-FOSS in 1 weekend[1] [google.com] and about Munich saving millions by switching to FOSS (as well as getting control over their ridiculous IT infrastructure).
    It's nice when folks document their successes and we have those to point to / learn from.

    [1] There are also accounts that mention converting 40,000 boxes.
    Most of those pages seem to think it was Extremadura's first try at FOSS.
    It wasn't. That was A MOP-UP EFFORT to get the remaining boxes that had been running proprietary apps which were found to be replaceable by FOSS apps or otherwise usable without Redmond's OS.

    -- gewg_