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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: 2) by akinliat on Monday March 31 2014, @01:47PM

    by akinliat (1898) <akinliatNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday March 31 2014, @01:47PM (#23676)

    If the user has been on XP for a good part of a decade, they're already used to the whole "lose everything and reinstall" every time they get a virus or a hard drive crash or whatever.

    Heh. My brother would regularly call me up every year or two to ask where to find NIC drivers for a machine I got him. He did reinstalls just because it was the only way to keep cruft from slowing the machine to unusability.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:16AM (#23892)

    [Windoze] cruft[...]slowing the machine to unusability

    This is a good place to mention that, unlike M$'s dreck, Linux get FASTER with use (memory management and filesystems).
    A filesystem that first looks for a space large enough to write the ENTIRE file is a filesystem that doesn't require defragging.

    -- gewg_