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from the can't-resist-that-minty-freshness dept.
prospectacle writes:
How to best replace Windows XP has become interesting to a much wider group of people, due to the end of official support for the product. (a previous story mentioned an Indian state government that urged its departments to use India's home-grown linux distro "BOSS Linux").
Some people may be using XP because it came with their computer and they never gave it a second thought, but there are probably plenty of others who don't want to spend the money, don't like the look of Windows 8, have older hardware, or are just used to the XP interface.
To these people, ZDNet humbly offers Linux Mint as a suggestion to replace XP.
They provide fairly compelling arguments to their target audience like:
- You can make it look almost exactly like XP
- It's free
- You can boot the live CD to try before you "buy".
- Decent, free alternatives exist for email, office, book-keeping and web-browsing.
- Virtually no need for any anti-virus for home users.
- Installation is quite easy these days.
- Works on fairly modest hardwar
Ending free support for a 12 year old product seems like a sensible policy for a for-profit entity like microsoft. In the past they've been able to count on people upgrading from old microsoft products to new microsoft products, and so any measure that would encourage (or pressure) people to upgrade would increase their sales.
Seems like a winning formula.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Monday March 31 2014, @12:27PM
The end-of-life of Windows XP was publicly announced how many years ago? And last week at work, I got an email saying my the company was forming a committee to investigate how to handle this transition. *facepalm* If that had come out tomorrow (April 1) I would feel better about it.
Though really, if you have got by this long with XP on a desktop machine, my advice is to just unplug it from the network because clearly you are not paying attention to the Internet anyway. :-)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Nerdfest on Monday March 31 2014, @12:40PM
Amazing, isn't it. I think Scott Adams is an optimist.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Monday March 31 2014, @05:01PM
There are a lot of XP home users who only have the one computer that works fine for what they're using it for. If a safety defect is discovered in your 2002 Ford, Ford will fix it free. Insecure software is dangerous software and MS should fix their security bugs and insecure design flaws in XP (which still came on new computers only five years ago) until there are so few on the internet that they won't matter. Ending security upgrades is irresponsible of Microsoft.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by emg on Monday March 31 2014, @05:44PM
But how else are they going to get people to move to Window 8?
We have one XP machine left at home that gets used a lot, and that's solely so my girlfriend can run iTunes, which doesn't run on Linux in Wine. There's no way I'm going to pay $100 to install Windows 7 on there just because Microsoft refuse to support it, and there's definitely no way I'm downgrading it to Window 8.
I'll just have to seal it off from the rest of the LAN, though, since there's only one other Windows machine there and it's almost never on at the same time as the iTunes machine, it's unlikely to be a risk to anything but itself.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 31 2014, @08:00PM
Do you still need itunes?
I went thru the same mental gymnastics with my kids computer, back in the very oldest days of iDevices you Really needed a machine running itunes to operate an ipod touch / ipad but they changed things such that you only need itunes to initially activate, and I believe now you don't need itunes at all, iDevices seem to now be completely self contained. The iPads the school issued to my kids have never been sync'd to any PC/mac since they were issued. They come home with the kids so no one is secretly syncing all of them at school overnight. Everything is done on the device itself, installing apps, whatever.
So its possible you no longer need itunes at all.
(Score: 1) by emg on Monday March 31 2014, @08:12PM
Not sure. I don't think the iPod has wi-fi, so the only way to get music on it, at least proprietary stuff, is probably via iTunes.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 31 2014, @09:05PM
OK I see what you're getting at. A nano or shuffle or classic ipod would continue to require itunes...
For some years I had an original PPC mac mini on my desk as a secondary machine, and perhaps something like that would run itunes. Or maybe you'd need a newer intel mac mini. It would be cheap, virus proof, and most importantly, something new and fun to fool around with.
(Score: 1) by cykros on Monday March 31 2014, @09:58PM
Won't iTunes run in a VM, assuming you actually still need it at all? With a sane VirtualBox setup, I imagine there's no huge reason that a Linux host system with xp in a VM wouldn't solve the problem.
Sure, your VM then may still be vulnerable, but snapshots and reasonable seclusion from the rest of the network go a long way to make that a non-issue.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday March 31 2014, @10:13PM
Not to mention as we saw the other day on the other site that Linux is NOT a credible replacement, for example sticky keys, which is VERY useful for those that have certain disabilities, has been broken for everal versions now and the last one where it worked will be out of support before XP will.
The Linux fanboys, or FOSSies as I call them because like Moonies they treat the GPL as a religion, can bitch and moan all they want but the fact of the matter is Linux is NEVER stable, shit that worked in Foo can be broken in Foo+1 and not be fixed until Foo+5 if its fixed at all, and like it or not the drivers of a Windows system will last the life of the OS without fail. As an example a year and a half ago I retired the box I used as a nettop at the shop and that system ran from WinXP RTM to 2012 with ZERO driver failures. Furthermore the software that was installed at RTM was still running when I sold it, that is 12+ years of fully functional OS.
Any Linux users that tells you they could go even half that length without the OS being shit upon by an upgrade is frankly full of shit as the ONLY Linux distros that seem to give a shit about such things are paid distros like RHEL which cost several times more than Windows does to own. Hell look at the upheaval the OS has gone through in that period of time, tossing the functional ALSA for the shittastic Pulse, Throwing the functional KDE 3 and gnome 2 for the alpha quality KDE 4 and gnome 3 which to this day don't have all the features the previous one did...I'm starting to sense a pattern here.
Bottom line if the machine is less than 6 years old it'll run Windows 7 just fine and its a hell of a lot cheaper to just slap Win 7 on and call it a day than to deal with the beta quality "open up bash and type this pile of gibberish that just FYI hope you have the programming skills to tweak" bullshit that is Linux. I have customers with circa 2006 Pentium Ds and first gen Athlon-64s and Win 7? Purrs like a kitten on 'em. No tweaking, no muss, no fuss, in fact I have run into exactly TWO pieces of hardware and ONE piece of software that wouldn't run on Win 7 and I must have done hundreds of installs since Win 7 RTM. In the hardware case it cost less than $40 to replace the pair and in the software case it was Quicken being douchebags (what else is new?) so a simple XP Mode install for running the old version of QB solved that problem.
For any FOSSies that don't believe me? Please look up "The Hairyfeet Challenge" which NO LINUX has EVER passed, even though it gives the advantage in multiple areas to Linux. Even with only requiring 5 years of support, no fancy or strange hardware or software? Linux still can't even muster 5 years for any of the mainstream distros, none. If someone has stuck with XP for THIS amount of time having to constantly fiddle with the OS or deal with "upgrade foo broke my wireless" is NOT gonna be for them.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31 2014, @10:30PM
Someone's off their meds again eh?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:34AM
The Hairyfeet Challenge
Here's The Brad Rodriquez Challenge, [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [goodbyemicrosoft.net] dating back to 2008, aka Will your out-of-the-box OS complete this obstacle course?
antiX (pronounced "Antiques") is shown on that page, again, from 2008; current antiX is 13.x.
(In 2008, he was trying to find something to run on 450MHz machines.)
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday April 01 2014, @07:53AM
Either have the balls to have an account or please quit wasting yours and my time, i don't mess with ACs. Oh and just FYI but if you have to buy "special hardware" to make it work? You are NOT a replacement for Windows, you are a MAC. Good day.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.