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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: 4, Interesting) by seandiggity on Monday March 31 2014, @07:49PM
I know everyone has a pet distro or two, but let's *try* not to get petty over it. Or, more importantly, not completely dismiss the idea of installing GNU/Linux as a replacement for XP. It is easier than ever to do that, as anyone who has been helping others "make the switch" will tell you.
Reasons it's easier now:
1. Multitude of basic WIMP interfaces that run on aging hardware. My choices are Xfce, MATE, Lxde, or Openbox (loosely in order of most to least resource-intensive)
2. Great NTFS support, and good support for other MS technologies (Samba comes to mind).
3. Installers now make the partition / resize / install process very easy.
4. Much easier than it used to be to copy sensible, "Windows-like", defaults between systems with different hardware and capabilities (apt-clone etc.)
5. Many people now have their files elsewhere or have abandoned their old comp so long ago they don't care about the files on it (maybe they've been using a phone or tablet, or backup through some cloud service).
6. Much better driver support
7. Webkit/Blink and Gecko own the Web, not IE.
8. People seem more open to the idea of a non-XP interface now that they're forced into it everywhere else.