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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: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday March 31 2014, @09:36AM
Oh please, have you ever been able to easily upgrade Windows without doing a full backup for safety?
Even with the rolling-release distros, there've been big problems reported doing that sometimes. Businesses don't want software on the cutting edge, they want stuff that's stable and dependable. Mint works fine for that (stick to an LTS release of course).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 31 2014, @10:05AM
Yes. Every time except for 3.1 to 95. Possible exception for ME on the grounds that there was no way to install it and not wish you hadn't.
Yeah, I'm aware of some of the major snafus in rolling release. I've even been bitten by them. Let me tell you though, it's damned nice not having to reinstall or go through a major upgrade every six months.
If lack of upgrading is a money/time thing, rolling release is the way to go. Follow the rss news feed for your distro and wait a week before installing upgrades to critical packages and you will likely never have to deal with the big oops.
If it's a stability thing, yes, LTS is much better than upgrading every six months and might even be as viable a choice as Stable. Then again, it's still guaranteed to go out of support much faster than XP did. With Debian or nearly every derivative distro except Mint, the preferred method is to upgrade the live system on the fly and reboot. 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.
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 31 2014, @10:58AM
You OBVIOUSLY didn't upgrade XPSP2 to XPSP3 on an AMD CPU in it's first release. Upgrading Win98SE to WinME wasn't a cakewalk either. I have read other horror stories as well - and no professional sysadmin fearlessly leaps into the task of upgrading his company's computers. I think that nearly everyone who reads a slash site agrees that fools run where angels fear to tread when it comes to updates, on any platform.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 31 2014, @08:06PM
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. /. page; be sure to append &strip=1 to the URL of the Cache and /. gets no pagehits.
Even better, you can view Google's Cache of a
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Monday March 31 2014, @08:08PM
Thank you, Microsoft, for job security.
I remember with a bug with Windows Vista around the SP1 release, where the NTFS journal would fill up and the system would blue screen. And not just the installed OS - any Vista that didn't get the hotfix would blue screen with this volume attached, including the installation disk.
The only solution, until the hotfix came out, was to launch a Linux live CD and delete the journal metafile, or format the whole drive. I still laugh at the irony of it sometimes.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday March 31 2014, @12:53PM
I always wiped the drive when reinstalling Windows because upgrading it leaves old crap behind. When upgrading from 98 to XP, I didn't bother and it ran dog-slow. Then I had to wipe it because it "disabled" my CD burning software, informed me of it on every boot, and wouldn't let me uninstall it. Windows ran fine after I wiped and reinstalled.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday April 01 2014, @09:16AM
> 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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Monday March 31 2014, @10:09AM
Yes. [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by pmontra on Monday March 31 2014, @10:52AM
You backup because backing up is wise even if you're not upgrading the OS. If you backup daily you don't have to make any special backup when you upgrade. Wiping the drive is retarded IMHO. That's why I never even evaluated Mint. By the way, some of those people on XP are still there because 1) they don't backup, just cross fingers, 2) they don't want to reinstall. Mint's is not an option for them. How about Ubuntu with LXDE or any other XP like WM?