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Linux Mint as Mainstream Replacement for XP

posted by mrbluze on Monday March 31 2014, @08:14AM   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.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31 2014, @08:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31 2014, @08:06PM (#23816)

    Win98SE to WinME wasn't a cakewalk either

    hairyfeet, who has posted to this thread, has repeatedly identified the giant problem there:
    MICROS~1 decided to mix device driver types. [google.com][1]
    If you (and your whitebox vendor) choose a single type and stick with that, you're OK; mix them and you were screwed.

    [1] If accessing /. pages these days, I recommend using the fuckbeta.slashdot.org subdomain to send a message to Dice Holdings.
    Even better, you can view Google's Cache of a /. page; be sure to append &strip=1 to the URL of the Cache and /. gets no pagehits.

    -- gewg_