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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31 2014, @03:54PM
This, this, this, and this! I really wanted to like Mint, but the "upgrade the hard way pal" policy just put me off. That, and the fact that it couldn't handle my simple dual monitor setup on very old hardware.
After trying a bunch of distros it turned out that, in the end, Kubuntu still hit the spot for me. I didn't want to give Ubuntu any more eyeballs (adware,Unity), but Kubuntu is really excellent.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday March 31 2014, @05:16PM
I seldom mod ACs but I'd mod that guy up if I hadn't already commented. I've been running kubuntu myself since 2007. Have installed it and before kubuntu, Mandrake and Mandriva on friends' XP computers when they repeatedly got "infected" (trojans) and they were all happy with it. Unlike Windows, Linux upgrades usually make the machine faster rather than slower when upgrading, so a new OS will, unlike Windows, run well on an old computer.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:56AM
Linux[...], unlike Windows, run well on an old computer
You left out a word:
...will run well on an EXTREMELY old computer. [goodbyemicrosoft.net]
Look at the minimum specs of e.g. Deli(cate) Linux.
(That is a fork of Desktop Light Linux aka DeLi.)
-- gewg
(Score: 2, Informative) by emg on Monday March 31 2014, @05:47PM
My last Mint upgrade took about an hour after downloading the install image and backing up to a USB drive in the background. My last Ubuntu upgrade ran overnight downloading and installing files, crashed part-way through, and required several hours to fix. I think I eventually did a clean reinstall on that machine anyway, because it never worked right after the upgrade.