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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: 1) by Bartman12345 on Monday March 31 2014, @01:26PM
Yes, I think there are some cases where the best option is just to keep on running XP.
The only real reason to upgrade after support is dropped is lack of security updates. If a user is only using their PC for email, a bit of web browsing and the occasional game of Freecell then the disruption and expense of changing their OS is probably not worth it. A lot of older users fall into this category, and a surprising number of not-so-old users as well.
Of course there is a possibility that this may leave these PCs vulnerable to attack if an exploit is found after support is dropped, but it's MUCH more likely that the machine will be put at risk by the user themselves installing PC Optimizer Pro because some random website told them to.
(Score: 1) by Drew617 on Monday March 31 2014, @02:48PM
Agree that sticking with XP is the right choice in limited cases. Most of the time I'd call it wrong, whether or not the user agrees, because it's effectively unpatchable. In the industry where I work, that argument isn't necessary: $applicable_standard says it's wrong, and I'm not going to accept any liability by helping you make it work. The only correct answer is to get it out of your environment.
Agree that upgrading to Win7/8 is the right choice much more of the time. I'm not a MS fan by any means - don't touch anything MS outside work and hold no M$ certs.
Don't mean to repeat myself, but I really don't know of any home user who truly fits that "just needs web and email" case.
The two least-informed users I can think of are my mother and girlfriend. Mom comes close to the test case but has a film negative scanner, and I can't imagine letting her loose with xsane and gimp and asking her to make it work.
Girlfriend is the "file everything on the desktop" type, not really aware of the filesystem, and can't use iTunes to sync podcasts half the time. Even she has some remote access software from work (browser-based SSL VPN, forget which vendor) that won't work under Linux.
I can work with Linux on the desktop thanks to Wine or Win7 in a VM in cases where I really, really need to use a Windows somethingorother. Probably like many of us here. But I wouldn't dream of suggesting either solution to a user who hadn't already arrived at it on their own.
Once again, my impression only, but even the "web and email" computer users I know have a handful of third party things that need to work. I suspect some of the people who DID fit the case have moved on to tablets.