On 28 October 2013 08:38, Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com wrote:
Well, I hear what you say about EOL, but Linux Mint Cinnamon seems to be the best bet at the moment for users used to XP.
The "best" (ie lowest learning curve, all sorts of other Linux advocacy stuff aside) bet *at the moment* is XP, it is after all still supported until April. Ubuntu 13.10 (and derivatives) are supported until July(?). I can't get people to ditch XP due to lack of ongoing support in favour of something else that only gives them an extra couple of months unless they do something again. They had XP for many years, they're not going to buy into major upgrades every 9 months, even though they are "free".
From an Ubuntu point of view that leaves me limited to LTS releases
(12.04 LTS goes EOL in April 2017, plenty of time for me to have helped them upgrade to a 14.04 release if their hardware hasn't gone past the point of being worth keeping by then).
I don't think Ubuntu itself is the best choice though, so Lubuntu or Mint (13) seem safer bets. But how good were Cinnamon/MATE 18 months ago? Also, upgrading Lubuntu 12.04 -> 14.04 when the time comes is going to be a lot simpler than Mint.
(LMDE sounds like a good concept but the "Cons" listed on its download page make it sound perfect for me, but not close to ready for family/friends.)
I know that Mint requires one to blow away the whole machine to apply a new release (but I hear they are working on that), but if you can steer the XP users into using a server to store data rather than "home", and ti use IMAP rather than POP for email, it makes the process easier as their is a lot less data to migrate.
It still needs an upgrade, ie a major process they can't/won't do themselves.
Graphics hardware has always been a problem, but when XP dies, I'm sure there will be a lot of newish old kit for sale for upgrades.
Again, these are to all intents and purposes unattended upgrades. They're not going to swap out a graphics card. They never needed to do that with XP, and Linux is supposed to be "better"! :-)