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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: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 31 2014, @02:53PM
You wanted a rolling release, you were offered a rolling release. You can try this one instead http://www.sabayon.org/ [sabayon.org]
It seems to me that "rolling release" is nearly synonymous with "cutting edge", or at least "almost cutting edge". Besides, Debian Testing has been at least as stable as any Microsoft release for years now.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday March 31 2014, @03:41PM
"Besides, Debian Testing has been at least as stable as any Microsoft release for years now."
The following is slightly dramatized but is more or less true:
The main problem with testing is someone files a RC bug on KDE because there's a typo in the Romanian language localization of the konsole manpage (LOL), so KDE disappears from testing because of the RC bug, so today you can't install it, or a roll back would yank out a bunch of unrelated packages that depend on some obscure feature of that exact version of KDE, or the last version of KDE without a typo in the manpage was vers 1.1. Or you could downgrade the bug from RC to mere wishlist, but...
Then they fix the typo in the Romanian language manpage for konsole, and do a complete upload of all of KDE with a new revision number, so every "testing" KDE user in the world has to burn the bandwidth and time to download the entire 700 megs (or whatever it is) KDE system and reinstall the entire thing. All to fix a manpage typo.
Repeat the day after tomorrow, because someone re-arranged the order of menu entries in emacs or Gnome now has a debian/control one line description that doesn't start with an article (a, an) which is a real lintian warning believe it or not because it is part of Policy.
This is before getting started with upstream released a new version which just shuffles around copyrights. Or maybe it is a "real" upstream release with lots of bugs fixed in amarok, and although the user has it installed, he doesn't use it and doesn't care, but here comes a gig of packages to install...
And yeah yeah a local package mirror helps, etc etc. Still burns time.
An interesting innovation in software distribution would be someone with a centralized puppet-server-like-thing distributing an OS that way, rather than on a package single file basis. That would certainly be interesting. Or distribute all software packages as a git repo not a single file. Ah innovation, always strangled by tradition....
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday March 31 2014, @04:47PM
Or distribute all software packages as a git repo not a single file.
Gentoo? I still run it and am always amazed that everything is built from source.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 31 2014, @05:55PM
I guess I'm asking for that but without the build. Not a GIT of package source, not a GIT of what the OS devs add, but the "individual files in a .deb, but broken out in a GIT" so a couple hundred meg deb doesn't need to be re-downloaded for a change in the manpages or whatever.
(Score: 1) by sbgen on Monday March 31 2014, @06:56PM
May be you should checkout NixOS (https://nixos.org/nixos/)??
Warning: Not a computer expert, but got to use it. Yes, my kind does exist.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 31 2014, @08:14PM
Thats close-ish but its still a "download sources and compile".
I'm looking for something a little lower and simpler. Gimmie Debian as it is. At the last-ish step dpkg-buildpackage takes a perfectly normal-ish set of directories ready for installation and makes two TAR files out of them, and then runs one of about half dozen file compressors on them (lzma or whatever) then uses ancient old AR (not tar, ar) to mush those two together. Then dpkg on the install side basically undoes all that work.
I'm suggesting, dpkg-buildpackage takes that nice directory structure and ... git commit the works and git push up to "somewhere". Then the end users simply git pull their way to happiness. apt-get upgrade boils down to little more than "git pull" every repo, make sure the pulls all went OK, and then run the install scripts (as relevant).
There are some minor problems, like a cloned git repo would inherently hold every binary that was ever pushed. Well, you could work around that by creating a new blank repo at release time. Or more specifically when 9.0 gets released the new git repo for 9.0 contains absolutely nothing but the 9.0 release. So for the whole dev cycle of 9.0.something until 10.0 is released, you can transparently switch to and install any version that is part of 9.0.something.
(Score: 2) by lothmordor on Monday March 31 2014, @10:58PM
Before I had broadband, I used Deltup [linux01.gwdg.de] on my gentoo box to patch packages to more recent versions. Saved an incredible amount of time and bandwidth. I haven't used it in years though, so not sure how well it works today.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by cykros on Monday March 31 2014, @10:06PM
Or do away with human-defined dependencies and do things the Slackware way. pkgtool has no problem letting you install packages if you don't have the necessary libraries...they just won't run until the libraries are in place. No unnecessary dependencies just because some dev thought you NEEDED them, no yanking large portions of your package base off the system just because you removed one package...
Gentoo, Arch, and Slackware (and derivatives) are fairly quickly becoming some of the only distros out there that actually feel much like Linux anymore... For the world of idiotproofing, Debian still would be my first pick, but the problems arising from various quirks got to be more than I cared to deal with awhile ago, and I've seen no reason to go back.
(Score: 1) by danomac on Monday March 31 2014, @09:55PM
That basically describes gentoo. In your example above, a new package labeled '-r1' would be added to the tree with a single patch to fix the small problem. In most cases this doesn't even require downloading the source tarball, just the patch to fix it. The patch would be applied, then configured, built and installed.