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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 mcgrew on Monday March 31 2014, @05:01PM
There are a lot of XP home users who only have the one computer that works fine for what they're using it for. If a safety defect is discovered in your 2002 Ford, Ford will fix it free. Insecure software is dangerous software and MS should fix their security bugs and insecure design flaws in XP (which still came on new computers only five years ago) until there are so few on the internet that they won't matter. Ending security upgrades is irresponsible of Microsoft.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by emg on Monday March 31 2014, @05:44PM
But how else are they going to get people to move to Window 8?
We have one XP machine left at home that gets used a lot, and that's solely so my girlfriend can run iTunes, which doesn't run on Linux in Wine. There's no way I'm going to pay $100 to install Windows 7 on there just because Microsoft refuse to support it, and there's definitely no way I'm downgrading it to Window 8.
I'll just have to seal it off from the rest of the LAN, though, since there's only one other Windows machine there and it's almost never on at the same time as the iTunes machine, it's unlikely to be a risk to anything but itself.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 31 2014, @08:00PM
Do you still need itunes?
I went thru the same mental gymnastics with my kids computer, back in the very oldest days of iDevices you Really needed a machine running itunes to operate an ipod touch / ipad but they changed things such that you only need itunes to initially activate, and I believe now you don't need itunes at all, iDevices seem to now be completely self contained. The iPads the school issued to my kids have never been sync'd to any PC/mac since they were issued. They come home with the kids so no one is secretly syncing all of them at school overnight. Everything is done on the device itself, installing apps, whatever.
So its possible you no longer need itunes at all.
(Score: 1) by emg on Monday March 31 2014, @08:12PM
Not sure. I don't think the iPod has wi-fi, so the only way to get music on it, at least proprietary stuff, is probably via iTunes.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 31 2014, @09:05PM
OK I see what you're getting at. A nano or shuffle or classic ipod would continue to require itunes...
For some years I had an original PPC mac mini on my desk as a secondary machine, and perhaps something like that would run itunes. Or maybe you'd need a newer intel mac mini. It would be cheap, virus proof, and most importantly, something new and fun to fool around with.
(Score: 1) by cykros on Monday March 31 2014, @09:58PM
Won't iTunes run in a VM, assuming you actually still need it at all? With a sane VirtualBox setup, I imagine there's no huge reason that a Linux host system with xp in a VM wouldn't solve the problem.
Sure, your VM then may still be vulnerable, but snapshots and reasonable seclusion from the rest of the network go a long way to make that a non-issue.