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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: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 31 2014, @12:39PM
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by owlman17 on Monday March 31 2014, @12:51PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 31 2014, @12:55PM
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 31 2014, @02:53PM
You wanted a rolling release, you were offered a rolling release. You can try this one instead http://www.sabayon.org/ [sabayon.org]
It seems to me that "rolling release" is nearly synonymous with "cutting edge", or at least "almost cutting edge". Besides, Debian Testing has been at least as stable as any Microsoft release for years now.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday March 31 2014, @03:41PM
"Besides, Debian Testing has been at least as stable as any Microsoft release for years now."
The following is slightly dramatized but is more or less true:
The main problem with testing is someone files a RC bug on KDE because there's a typo in the Romanian language localization of the konsole manpage (LOL), so KDE disappears from testing because of the RC bug, so today you can't install it, or a roll back would yank out a bunch of unrelated packages that depend on some obscure feature of that exact version of KDE, or the last version of KDE without a typo in the manpage was vers 1.1. Or you could downgrade the bug from RC to mere wishlist, but...
Then they fix the typo in the Romanian language manpage for konsole, and do a complete upload of all of KDE with a new revision number, so every "testing" KDE user in the world has to burn the bandwidth and time to download the entire 700 megs (or whatever it is) KDE system and reinstall the entire thing. All to fix a manpage typo.
Repeat the day after tomorrow, because someone re-arranged the order of menu entries in emacs or Gnome now has a debian/control one line description that doesn't start with an article (a, an) which is a real lintian warning believe it or not because it is part of Policy.
This is before getting started with upstream released a new version which just shuffles around copyrights. Or maybe it is a "real" upstream release with lots of bugs fixed in amarok, and although the user has it installed, he doesn't use it and doesn't care, but here comes a gig of packages to install...
And yeah yeah a local package mirror helps, etc etc. Still burns time.
An interesting innovation in software distribution would be someone with a centralized puppet-server-like-thing distributing an OS that way, rather than on a package single file basis. That would certainly be interesting. Or distribute all software packages as a git repo not a single file. Ah innovation, always strangled by tradition....
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday March 31 2014, @04:47PM
Or distribute all software packages as a git repo not a single file.
Gentoo? I still run it and am always amazed that everything is built from source.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 31 2014, @05:55PM
I guess I'm asking for that but without the build. Not a GIT of package source, not a GIT of what the OS devs add, but the "individual files in a .deb, but broken out in a GIT" so a couple hundred meg deb doesn't need to be re-downloaded for a change in the manpages or whatever.
(Score: 1) by sbgen on Monday March 31 2014, @06:56PM
May be you should checkout NixOS (https://nixos.org/nixos/)??
Warning: Not a computer expert, but got to use it. Yes, my kind does exist.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 31 2014, @08:14PM
Thats close-ish but its still a "download sources and compile".
I'm looking for something a little lower and simpler. Gimmie Debian as it is. At the last-ish step dpkg-buildpackage takes a perfectly normal-ish set of directories ready for installation and makes two TAR files out of them, and then runs one of about half dozen file compressors on them (lzma or whatever) then uses ancient old AR (not tar, ar) to mush those two together. Then dpkg on the install side basically undoes all that work.
I'm suggesting, dpkg-buildpackage takes that nice directory structure and ... git commit the works and git push up to "somewhere". Then the end users simply git pull their way to happiness. apt-get upgrade boils down to little more than "git pull" every repo, make sure the pulls all went OK, and then run the install scripts (as relevant).
There are some minor problems, like a cloned git repo would inherently hold every binary that was ever pushed. Well, you could work around that by creating a new blank repo at release time. Or more specifically when 9.0 gets released the new git repo for 9.0 contains absolutely nothing but the 9.0 release. So for the whole dev cycle of 9.0.something until 10.0 is released, you can transparently switch to and install any version that is part of 9.0.something.
(Score: 2) by lothmordor on Monday March 31 2014, @10:58PM
Before I had broadband, I used Deltup [linux01.gwdg.de] on my gentoo box to patch packages to more recent versions. Saved an incredible amount of time and bandwidth. I haven't used it in years though, so not sure how well it works today.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by cykros on Monday March 31 2014, @10:06PM
Or do away with human-defined dependencies and do things the Slackware way. pkgtool has no problem letting you install packages if you don't have the necessary libraries...they just won't run until the libraries are in place. No unnecessary dependencies just because some dev thought you NEEDED them, no yanking large portions of your package base off the system just because you removed one package...
Gentoo, Arch, and Slackware (and derivatives) are fairly quickly becoming some of the only distros out there that actually feel much like Linux anymore... For the world of idiotproofing, Debian still would be my first pick, but the problems arising from various quirks got to be more than I cared to deal with awhile ago, and I've seen no reason to go back.
(Score: 1) by danomac on Monday March 31 2014, @09:55PM
That basically describes gentoo. In your example above, a new package labeled '-r1' would be added to the tree with a single patch to fix the small problem. In most cases this doesn't even require downloading the source tarball, just the patch to fix it. The patch would be applied, then configured, built and installed.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday March 31 2014, @03:34PM
Surely you don't want a rolling release on Debian *Stable*?! The distro that comes out every 1.5 years? I struggle to see how the term "rolling release" could ever apply in that situation.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday March 31 2014, @01:36PM
Oh please, have you ever been able to easily upgrade Windows without doing a full backup for safety?
Even with the rolling-release distros, there've been big problems reported doing that sometimes. Businesses don't want software on the cutting edge, they want stuff that's stable and dependable. Mint works fine for that (stick to an LTS release of course).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 31 2014, @02:05PM
Yes. Every time except for 3.1 to 95. Possible exception for ME on the grounds that there was no way to install it and not wish you hadn't.
Yeah, I'm aware of some of the major snafus in rolling release. I've even been bitten by them. Let me tell you though, it's damned nice not having to reinstall or go through a major upgrade every six months.
If lack of upgrading is a money/time thing, rolling release is the way to go. Follow the rss news feed for your distro and wait a week before installing upgrades to critical packages and you will likely never have to deal with the big oops.
If it's a stability thing, yes, LTS is much better than upgrading every six months and might even be as viable a choice as Stable. Then again, it's still guaranteed to go out of support much faster than XP did. With Debian or nearly every derivative distro except Mint, the preferred method is to upgrade the live system on the fly and reboot. Much less of a headache than having to go through Mint's nuke it from orbit method unless you don't store any data locally on any of the boxes and are going to just push a new image to them.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 31 2014, @02:58PM
You OBVIOUSLY didn't upgrade XPSP2 to XPSP3 on an AMD CPU in it's first release. Upgrading Win98SE to WinME wasn't a cakewalk either. I have read other horror stories as well - and no professional sysadmin fearlessly leaps into the task of upgrading his company's computers. I think that nearly everyone who reads a slash site agrees that fools run where angels fear to tread when it comes to updates, on any platform.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:06AM
Win98SE to WinME wasn't a cakewalk either
hairyfeet, who has posted to this thread, has repeatedly identified the giant problem there:
MICROS~1 decided to mix device driver types. [google.com][1]
If you (and your whitebox vendor) choose a single type and stick with that, you're OK; mix them and you were screwed.
[1] If accessing /. pages these days, I recommend using the fuckbeta.slashdot.org subdomain to send a message to Dice Holdings. /. page; be sure to append &strip=1 to the URL of the Cache and /. gets no pagehits.
Even better, you can view Google's Cache of a
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:08AM
Thank you, Microsoft, for job security.
I remember with a bug with Windows Vista around the SP1 release, where the NTFS journal would fill up and the system would blue screen. And not just the installed OS - any Vista that didn't get the hotfix would blue screen with this volume attached, including the installation disk.
The only solution, until the hotfix came out, was to launch a Linux live CD and delete the journal metafile, or format the whole drive. I still laugh at the irony of it sometimes.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday March 31 2014, @04:53PM
I always wiped the drive when reinstalling Windows because upgrading it leaves old crap behind. When upgrading from 98 to XP, I didn't bother and it ran dog-slow. Then I had to wipe it because it "disabled" my CD burning software, informed me of it on every boot, and wouldn't let me uninstall it. Windows ran fine after I wiped and reinstalled.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday April 01 2014, @01:16PM
> Then again, it's still guaranteed to go out of support much faster than XP did.
Everything is guaranteed to go out of support faster than XP. XP staying in support for over a decade was not intended, Microsoft got stuck with it because (a) it took them so damn long to release a successor, (b) the successor was really poorly received and (c) by the time a decent successor finally arrived loads of people realised that there was no compelling reason to upgrade. Microsoft kept supporting it not out of choice, but because they were stuck with it.
> Much less of a headache than having to go through Mint's nuke it from orbit method unless you don't store any data locally on any of the boxes and are going to just push a new image to them.
I've never had a headache upgrading Mint. As long as you keep your home data on a separate partition to root, you just download the latest ISO, install the DVD over the root partition and you're golden.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Monday March 31 2014, @02:09PM
Yes. [youtube.com]
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1) by pmontra on Monday March 31 2014, @02:52PM
You backup because backing up is wise even if you're not upgrading the OS. If you backup daily you don't have to make any special backup when you upgrade. Wiping the drive is retarded IMHO. That's why I never even evaluated Mint. By the way, some of those people on XP are still there because 1) they don't backup, just cross fingers, 2) they don't want to reinstall. Mint's is not an option for them. How about Ubuntu with LXDE or any other XP like WM?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday March 31 2014, @03:07PM
These people are still on XP. Clearly they're NEVER going to update anyway, so why worry about how difficult the process is?
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2) by mrbluze on Monday March 31 2014, @09:17PM
Linux doesn't have to be a rolling release for corporate machines. Windows is distributed remotely through imaging the hardware, so there is no reason that Mint cannot be also. If user content and so forth is isolated from the process, upgrades COULD be done more or less seamlessly. The problem of Mint is it is not ideal for power users in this environment and clearly it is not a distribution intended for servers either.
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:39AM
I'm waiting for April 9, 2014 (the day after the final XP Patch Tuesday), when all the black hats who have been saving up their XP exploits release those.
Getting my popcorn ready now.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday March 31 2014, @03:30PM
A) I didn't get the vibe that the article was really targetted at company use.
B) You should kind of be following that same procedure no matter what OS you're talking about.
C) Mint *did* (does?) have a rolling-release version. In fact, it was also based on Debian [helpsite.org]. Unfortunately the XFCE-Debian-rolling combination seems rather flaky as to the schedule if/when they actually release it.
For personal home use, I would agree with the proposition of recommending Linux Mint.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31 2014, @11:57PM
the article was[n't] really [targeted]{1} at company use
FTFS: Virtually no need for any anti-virus for home users
This is the bone I came here to pick. "Virtually" is unnecessary in that sentence.
If you're not running a (e.g. for-profit mail) server, you have no need of an anti-virus app on your Linux box.
Any AV app that runs under Linux DOES NOT look for Linux-specific malware;
that's NOT how Linux handles these things.{2}
Those apps are looking for WINDOZE-SPECIFIC malware.
If you're just Joe Average running a Linux desktop system, let those folks who choose to run Windoze use their own resources and scan their own boxes for that Windoze-specific nonsense.
{1} Try a spellchecker, guy. They're free and very cool.
{2} Once an exploit against a FOSS app is discovered, the dev(s) patch their vulnerable code QUICKLY and release the patches QUICKLY.
To ward off malware under Linux, simply keep your box patched.
(You don't have to wait until the 2nd Tuesday of next month
and you don't need some 3rd party vendor supplying band-aids to paste all over your system.)
When a file hits a *n?x box, it isn't automagically executable; only MICROS~1 has chosen to do things that way.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31 2014, @03:54PM
This, this, this, and this! I really wanted to like Mint, but the "upgrade the hard way pal" policy just put me off. That, and the fact that it couldn't handle my simple dual monitor setup on very old hardware.
After trying a bunch of distros it turned out that, in the end, Kubuntu still hit the spot for me. I didn't want to give Ubuntu any more eyeballs (adware,Unity), but Kubuntu is really excellent.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday March 31 2014, @05:16PM
I seldom mod ACs but I'd mod that guy up if I hadn't already commented. I've been running kubuntu myself since 2007. Have installed it and before kubuntu, Mandrake and Mandriva on friends' XP computers when they repeatedly got "infected" (trojans) and they were all happy with it. Unlike Windows, Linux upgrades usually make the machine faster rather than slower when upgrading, so a new OS will, unlike Windows, run well on an old computer.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:56AM
Linux[...], unlike Windows, run well on an old computer
You left out a word:
...will run well on an EXTREMELY old computer. [goodbyemicrosoft.net]
Look at the minimum specs of e.g. Deli(cate) Linux.
(That is a fork of Desktop Light Linux aka DeLi.)
-- gewg
(Score: 2, Informative) by emg on Monday March 31 2014, @05:47PM
My last Mint upgrade took about an hour after downloading the install image and backing up to a USB drive in the background. My last Ubuntu upgrade ran overnight downloading and installing files, crashed part-way through, and required several hours to fix. I think I eventually did a clean reinstall on that machine anyway, because it never worked right after the upgrade.