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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: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday April 01 2014, @01:16PM
> Then again, it's still guaranteed to go out of support much faster than XP did.
Everything is guaranteed to go out of support faster than XP. XP staying in support for over a decade was not intended, Microsoft got stuck with it because (a) it took them so damn long to release a successor, (b) the successor was really poorly received and (c) by the time a decent successor finally arrived loads of people realised that there was no compelling reason to upgrade. Microsoft kept supporting it not out of choice, but because they were stuck with it.
> Much less of a headache than having to go through Mint's nuke it from orbit method unless you don't store any data locally on any of the boxes and are going to just push a new image to them.
I've never had a headache upgrading Mint. As long as you keep your home data on a separate partition to root, you just download the latest ISO, install the DVD over the root partition and you're golden.