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Linux Mint as Mainstream Replacement for XP

posted by mrbluze on Monday March 31 2014, @12:14PM   
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.

• Re:Answer looking for a questionRe:Answer looking for a question (Score: 2) by naubol on Monday March 31 2014, @02:35PM

  by naubol (1918) on Monday March 31 2014, @02:35PM (#23585)

  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...

  • Many pieces of hardware have prohibitively difficult driver issues, the most notorious being wifi dongles. Grandma can't just go to best buy and pickup a new wifi dongle to work with her Linux Mint.
  • Mount support for android phones is less than stellar.
  • The gui control panels are still less featured than windows and more likely to be buggy.
  • Even cinnamon, by far the most user friendly linux window manager imsho, seems to default to power user settings which confuse people.
  • There can be video card issues, especially when dealing with multiple monitors, that are just harder to solve. I've experienced so many of these I've learned far more than I wanted to about video cards to solve them.
  • Google drive doesn't work on Linux.
  • Quicken and other common, professional-quality personal finance software doesn't work on Linux and this really effing matters to a lot of people.
  • Linux doesn't blue screen, but all flavors of "user friendly" Linux window managers, excluding techy savvy window managers, tend to freeze or bug out such that the only way to recover is to try to a tty or ssh in and do something akin to "sudo service mdm restart" which is more complicated than control alt delete or straight reboot from blue screen.
  • A lot of people play a game or two that cannot easily be made to work on Linux. If it can be made to work, it often doesn't work very well and only under wine with a lot of hassle.
  • iTunes on linux is non-trivial to install/run. There is a very good chance that our use case wants this.

  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.

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• Re:Answer looking for a question(Score: 1) by blackest_k on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:23AM

  by blackest_k (2045) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:23AM (#23823)

  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.

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• Hardware with poor mfr support (yet again)(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:43AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:43AM (#23929)

  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_

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