On 29 October 2013 11:01, Laurie Brown laurie@brownowl.com wrote:
Check out the Zoostorm boxes on ebuyer.com that come with no OS installed.
If I can get them using Linux then when their existing boxes die then this is an option. At the moment they'd just suffer the extra £100 and go for a Windows box.
It's not really about the money, it's about spending it when there's no perceived "need" (ie XP still works fine, and they don't like that MS is forcing an upgrade). There's also a general feel that the PCs aren't being heavily used anyway, as more and more gets done on phones. I think one person, for example, would prefer to buy some cheap tablets for the kids to keep them away from her work laptop, than spend it on a new PC. But that said, having a PC in a controlled environment is better if she can start there.
"easy to use" can mean many things. I would argue that jumping from XP to W8 is a path of major pain and frustration. The same can be said of XP to W7, although that path is vastly easier - hardware issues aside.
Agreed. But as I noted, one will get blamed on MS and one on me :-)
I can't be the only one who sees this happen regularly. Eg: Upgrade to latest office, it messes up the import of an old Word document, it's just "progress". But instead, install LibreOffice and have the same result (or indeed a better result, but still not perfect), and it's all down to that open source rubbish. I have to fight this all the time and I'm sick of it!
Looking back, the big one was "it works in IE5 so Firefox must be broken". At least now the world has become multi-browser and standards matter more than they used to. It's the complete failure of MS to get a well established phone/tablet OS going, and the success of Apple and Android, that has forced this more than anything else. This same change means that it's no longer acceptable to have documents that only open on a Windows platform running Office, because people expect them to open on their tablets as well. If we move to a place where no one manufacturer has monopoly share it will be a great place to be and a long time coming, a side effect of which is that Linux-on-the-desktop starts to actually be viable for "normal" people.
You have until next year, probably the autumn, before this becomes urgent.
I'd say it needs sorting before April. That's the only "real" deadline. Go past that and things won't break and there'll be no reason to fix them until forced to by an exploit that targets XP and goes unfixed, by which point (for those affected) it will be too late.
"Before April" rules out new LTS versions of Ubuntu. It's a shame nobody saw the XP issue coming and got ready to capitalise on it; the current Ubuntu releases should have been LTS, allowing them to bring a new graphics stack into the next (now non-LTS) release, as well as putting a decent LTS version out there just in time for XP refugees. (It's still not too late to reclassify 13.10, Canonical!)
Mark