Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 15 submissions in the queue.
posted by mrbluze on Monday March 31 2014, @12:14PM   Printer-friendly
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.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31 2014, @04:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31 2014, @04:47PM (#23648)

    Which can be fulfilled with Linux Mint easily.

    My mom, wife, friends generally just use a browser and basic office processing at home. I installed linux mint on their machines several years ago, including my own and haven't had any serious issues. Also, team viewer works great on it for remotely accessing the machine and fixing anything wrong.

    Most folks today do everything with just a browser, which Linux Mint excels at (except obviously for sites using silverlight).

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @07:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @07:09AM (#23932)

    except obviously for sites using silverlight

    ...or maybe not so obvious. [google.com]

    -- gewg_