On 28 October 2013 15:56, Anthony Anson tony.anson@girolle.co.uk wrote:
Therefore solution must have on-going support (by which I mean OS updates).
Why?
I'm not sure what you're questioning here? Surely keeping any OS updated with security updates is considered good practice (assuming it has Internet access)?
The current *buntu releases "expire" only shortly after XP, and the LTS versions are quite old meaning that some of the newer goodies (eg Cinnamon) may be too early in their lives to thrust onto unsuspecting XP users.
If users are only going to run old programs compatible or similar to XP ones, there's little, if any, point.
The suggestion in this thread and elsewhere is that Cinnamon is a good desktop environment for XP users, but to my mind (and I'm happy to be told the contrary) it was very "new" back in April 2012 and so picking a distro that has such an early release of Cinnamon isn't ideal. On the other hand, newer OS releases aren't LTS and need too-frequent upgrades.
Putting all this together is why I am now looking at LTS versions of Xubuntu and Lubuntu (as XFCE etc are much older and a 2012-04 release doesn't concern me).
OK, Debian Lenny. I have it installed on a memory stick if you want to try it.
I have a 16GB USB stick with a few distrs on already and I'll be adding Debian to it. But I was looking at Wheezy rather than Lenny, is there a reason I should look at Lenny?
Lenny still copes with everything on my old 2001 PIII, and with anything I've used up to the end of last year.
.. unless this is the reason, that is. (Ie would Wheezy cause problems, either in hardware support or system requirements?)