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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: 2, Insightful) by Drew617 on Monday March 31 2014, @01:30PM
The folks I've encountered still on WinXP fall into two categories:
1. Somewhat savvy users who "know better" but need a legacy app which is broken in Win7/Win8
2. Users (old people, usually) who are still not entirely comfortable with WinXP and are unwilling to move to Win7/Win8 when XP still nominally "works"
Linux, regardless of distro, isn't the answer for these folks. The difference between WinXP and a distro that can be made to "look like XP" is greater than the difference between WinXP and Win7. Likewise I've found the paradigm often repeated on ./ in these threads - grandma who "just needs email and a web browser" - to be wrong. Even the still-intimidated-by-computer users I know have developed some skills and habits that will be broken in anything but Windows. I'm not sure you're doing the Linux community any favors by pushing it on a user who won't know how to deal with it.
This is likely to be modded down, remember it's just my impression based on my own experience/observations.
I do suspect there are a bunch of people who haven't upgraded because of cost, and Linux might be an appropriate answer for them, but I don't see those folks. /Linux user since '98 //Pragmatist since longer
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Adrian Harvey on Monday March 31 2014, @01:59PM
Those categories are pretty close for individual users, but there are quite a few holdout corporations. Some fit 1 and 2 (especially if you count 2 ask including those unwilling to stump up the money for the upgrade project because what they have works), but I would also posit the following additional categories
3. Organizations who have looked at the ammount of integration testing they think they need for all the apps they have got and deferred the upgrade. In some cases even just for web apps that 'might' have issues with a new browser version.
4. Organizations who have thought "while we're doing all that work for a rollout, we should go to office 2013 as well... Oh and upgrade sharepoint to get full benefit, and Exchange. Oh. and we should roll out that new JRE version to ensure compatibility. And we have to upgrade SCCM do deploy the new version, and we'd better redo all our group policies as we won't get another chance, and man! Isn't this going to be big, we'd better write a full business case for all that work."
3. Organizations where the project went off the rails and they decided to re-think
In general, if they can't manage an Windows upgrade project, an OS transition is likely to be just as hard. But if licensing cost is one of the issues, then perhaps... But for most larger companies, dealing with application compatibility is a big issue.
(Score: 1) by Drew617 on Monday March 31 2014, @02:09PM
Very good points.
I happen to work in an industry where all our customers must comply with some combination of HIPAA, HITECH and PCI. Nearly every client environment I touch at work has migrated away from WinXP/2003 already.
At this point when I hear XP I think "individual user," but I might be in a lucky position.
(Score: 1) by urza9814 on Monday March 31 2014, @04:53PM
(Score: 2) by naubol on Monday March 31 2014, @02:35PM
I absolutely love mint and use it on all my desktop machines, preferring debian for any machines whose primary purpose is running as a server. That said, I agree completely with your concerns, but here are a few more...
All that said, I do think mint is ready to replace XP in corporations where they have people doing certain kinds of things, like QA work on websites or just basic processing of this or that. The problem here is one of training IT support and restructuring. My understanding is there are a number of use cases written up where some organizations did exactly this for a lot of their desktop machines and reported lower TCO.
(Score: 1) by blackest_k on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:23AM
google grive for gdrive on linux there are a few other options 'google now' is also working admittedly on what seems to be a stable, unstable chrome build.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:43AM
When you go to buy hardware, take your bootable Mint ISO with you.
Boot to it and see if the gear is supported.
If not, say this in a loud clear voice:
"I won't give good money for hardware with poor support."
An even better distro for this task is Trisquel. [soylentnews.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31 2014, @03:40PM
The thing is, XP does work. So you've missed a third category:
3. Users for whom XP works
Why should they switch to windows 7 or above? If they don't have an SSD, and know enough to avoid the shadier parts of the web, then what are the positive reasons that compensate for spending 1-2 days on the install and 1-2 weeks bumping into the random UI changes microsoft puts into every release[1]?
[1] eg the dedicated quick launch bar, the annoying hybrid quick launch/taskbar, the horizontally-sorted Control Panel, and the ghettoization of the Programs menu
(Score: 1) by Bartman12345 on Monday March 31 2014, @05:26PM
Yes, I think there are some cases where the best option is just to keep on running XP.
The only real reason to upgrade after support is dropped is lack of security updates. If a user is only using their PC for email, a bit of web browsing and the occasional game of Freecell then the disruption and expense of changing their OS is probably not worth it. A lot of older users fall into this category, and a surprising number of not-so-old users as well.
Of course there is a possibility that this may leave these PCs vulnerable to attack if an exploit is found after support is dropped, but it's MUCH more likely that the machine will be put at risk by the user themselves installing PC Optimizer Pro because some random website told them to.
(Score: 1) by Drew617 on Monday March 31 2014, @06:48PM
Agree that sticking with XP is the right choice in limited cases. Most of the time I'd call it wrong, whether or not the user agrees, because it's effectively unpatchable. In the industry where I work, that argument isn't necessary: $applicable_standard says it's wrong, and I'm not going to accept any liability by helping you make it work. The only correct answer is to get it out of your environment.
Agree that upgrading to Win7/8 is the right choice much more of the time. I'm not a MS fan by any means - don't touch anything MS outside work and hold no M$ certs.
Don't mean to repeat myself, but I really don't know of any home user who truly fits that "just needs web and email" case.
The two least-informed users I can think of are my mother and girlfriend. Mom comes close to the test case but has a film negative scanner, and I can't imagine letting her loose with xsane and gimp and asking her to make it work.
Girlfriend is the "file everything on the desktop" type, not really aware of the filesystem, and can't use iTunes to sync podcasts half the time. Even she has some remote access software from work (browser-based SSL VPN, forget which vendor) that won't work under Linux.
I can work with Linux on the desktop thanks to Wine or Win7 in a VM in cases where I really, really need to use a Windows somethingorother. Probably like many of us here. But I wouldn't dream of suggesting either solution to a user who hadn't already arrived at it on their own.
Once again, my impression only, but even the "web and email" computer users I know have a handful of third party things that need to work. I suspect some of the people who DID fit the case have moved on to tablets.