On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 09:40:59AM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
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".
Those 'major upgrades' are surely as easy as the ongoing Windows updates aren't they?
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
I wouldn't go for Lubuntu personally, it's too 'rough at the edges' to my mind. I tried it for a while as a lighter alternative to Xubuntu and it simply wasn't as 'well finished'.
I think for a non-techie ex-windows user you're much better off with one of either Ubuntu or Kubuntu if you're going for an Ubuntu variant. The problem with either of Lubuntu or Xubuntu is that they don't always work the same as Ubuntu and thus you often have to 'read between the lines' when looking for support as menus, applications, etc. aren't exactly as they are in main-line Ubuntu.