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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 Covalent on Monday March 31 2014, @02:38PM
...or Ubuntu or Debian or any other distro. The parent is right: They can be configured to look and work very much like XP anyway.
The problem is and always has been software. I am the "unofficial tech guy" for my building. People call me before they call IT because 9 times out of 10 I can talk them through their problem over the phone. Almost none of the problems are OS related. They are all Word / Excel / PowerPoint problems.
Yes, I know, OO and LibreOffice are alternatives, but I've used them extensively and...eh. The conversions are not very good (particularly for Excel), the user interface is just not there yet. Google Docs is actually closer to acceptable than LibreOffice Calc is, imho.
So this tired argument runs into the same roadblock: To get rid of a pay OS, I have to accept free office software, and it's just not good enough to use yet.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday March 31 2014, @03:53PM
Even Office itself doesn't look like what it did on XP. LibreOffice is a damn sight closer...
Back in Ye Olden Computing Days Of Yore before we all ended up on Windows, everybody was resigned to platforms not being interoperable (at least I assume so...I wasn't there). Now, things are a lot closer (file formats being compatible between MS Office and Libre...hell, MS Office even "supports" ODF), but migrating away from Windows is still not acceptable unless there's 100.000% compatibility, which will obviously never happen.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by Hawkwind on Monday March 31 2014, @11:02PM
Yes! Libre is a lot closer to the look and feel of the old Office. Moving my folks to Libre was no problem at all, meanwhile at work I've ended up spending hours trying to figure out all the latest changes.
You know what I really miss? Being able to look 'under the hood' at what Word Perfect was doing. It was a lot like HTML, being able to see exactly what code was throwing the final product off. Of course I don't miss the DOS look and feel, or the slowness of WP 6 on most machines when it was released, but it was so easy to fix run-away codes and/or to get an exact look.
I could see paying for an office suite that actually wanted to make my life easier instead of trying to justify buying the latest and 'greatest'.
(Score: 1) by gawdonblue on Monday March 31 2014, @08:18PM
As the "unofficial tech guy" in my neighbourhood, I must humbly disagree: The interfaces on LibreOffice and OpenOffice are very close to the MS Office interfaces that most XP users are used to and work mighty fine - even as Excel replacements. The word processor's "Format-->Page" is about the only thing I ever have to point out to most new LibreOffice users.
I think you should keep off the ionics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:58AM
LibreOffice[...]The conversions are not very good (particularly for Excel)
It would be interesting to know the date of your last try at that.
Things are constantly improving over there. [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 05 2014, @08:57AM
"The German cities of Munich, Leipzig, and Jena, the Swiss Federal Court, and the Swiss Federal IT Steering Unit have issued" a call "to further improve interoperability between free and open source office suites"
"The tender specification lists five additional features to be developed, including new spreadsheet functions, chart styles..."
So, in the EU they're actually putting up some cash to get this right. [europa.eu]
-- gewg_