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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, 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