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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) by Thexalon on Monday March 31 2014, @02:22PM
Although I have some know-how, I didn't need it for the pre-installed Linux box I picked up a couple months ago. Here was my entire process for getting it up and running:
1. Plug in the power, network, and peripherals.
2. Turn it on.
3. Tell it about my time zone.
4. Tell it my locale preferences like keyboard layout and decimal formats. Defaults were US English in both cases.
5. Set up a username and password for my primary account.
6. Reboot.
Here's the process I recall going through to set up a new Windows box:
1. Plug in the power, network, and peripherals.
2. Turn it on.
3. Tell it about my time zone.
4. Tell it my locale preferences like keyboard layout and decimal formats. Defaults were US English in both cases.
5. Set up a username and password for my primary account.
6. Reboot.
1. Plug in the power, network, and peripherals.
2. Turn it on.3. Tell it about my time zone.
4. Tell it my locale preferences like keyboard layout and decimal formats. Defaults were US English in both cases.
5. Set up a username and password for my primary account.
6. Reboot.
Please explain to me why Linux requires more know-how. If you compare pre-installed Windows with installing Linux over an existing OS, that's apples versus oranges. The equivalent task to installing Linux over an existing OS would be installing Windows on what has previously been a Linux box, without losing data - doable, but also a pain in the keister.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday March 31 2014, @02:38PM
You have to know how to find a pre-installed Linux box. Sure, it's not hard, but it's not as easy as getting a pre-installed Windows box, for which the procedure basically is: "Buy any non-Apple computer you happen to find."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 31 2014, @03:40PM
Or be able to use Google [google.com] and consider the option.
The real problem is that desktop Linux simply doesn't have the marketing capabilities that Apple and Microsoft do.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by emg on Monday March 31 2014, @05:50PM
But then you boot it, see the Metro screen, and say 'oh crap, I thought this thing ran Windows' and take it back to the store.
Mint's UI is much closer to XP than Window 8 is. The only reason not to switch is when you have some Windows application you really, absolutely must run which doesn't run in Wine and has no Linux equivalent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @05:54AM
...and the final case is that that must-have Windoze-only app won't do its thing inside a virtual machine.
The *necessity* for running Windoze on bare metal is such a small segment of the market as to be noise.
Guys interfacing with really specialized industrial/scientific equipment is that tiny subset.
Anyone who has had to do a reinstall of Windoze on bare metal and has also replaced a snapshot of a VM install knows which one makes infinitely more sense.
-- gewg_