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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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31 2014, @09:19AM
Posting as anonymous coward because I can't remember my logon :)
Linux Mint does not take a lot of out-of-the-box config, especially if you don't insist on it looking exactly like XP. The task bar and "start" menu are in the same place. The other thing that bears mentioning is that I have used Office 2003 and Office 2007 extensively with Crossover Linux and both work very, very well. Not everything is perfect, but for a lot of use cases you'd never notice. So if Office is the only thing holding you back, I wouldn't let it stop you. My wife uses Xubuntu with Office 2007 and has no complaints - she is a researcher who writes a lot of peer-reviewed articles and uses some of the advanced features such as tracking changes and auto-referencing. Much of the Windows software I have that is as old as XP works well under Crossover. An LTS Ubuntu (or derivative) is a decent solution for a lot of people. This is a decent solution for a lot of small businesses OR personal users --- I'm not advocating enterprise-wide deployments.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Monday March 31 2014, @11:41AM
i.e., Linux Mint looks more like Windows than Windows 8 does.
A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.