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Re: [LUG] OT: Windows XP

 

On 15/02/14 11:20, Simon Avery wrote:
On 14 February 2014 20:31, bad apple <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

The change to any Linux distribution is vastly more of a change, with
users requiring at least some initial instruction.

Do you really think that?

My real-world sample suggests not - at least for non-technical users.

Rob has migrated several of our users, who are non-technical, across to Mint successfully. I've not heard of any complaints or dissatisfaction from those users, but I wouldn't really expect to. The cinnamon layout is intuitive, the same tools as they are trained to use on Windows (Firefox, Thunderbird) are there and behave exactly the same and the hardware is more responsive. (Even if all things were equal, not having AV scanning every file access is a considerable uplift).

The "initial instruction" is pretty much negligable, as long as they can see the firefox and thunderbird icons on the desktop. They don't even need to go into the menus or taskbar at all, although if they did, the various file navigators are not a million miles away from Explorer with familiar "My Files" or "Documents" folders.

For us being a charity, the licence fees for Windows, Office and AV (The only non-free software on every windows machine) are not huge and not the main motivator for this, but this switch has allowed us an extra year or two out of old single-cored hardware for occasional and light-use users.

There are some drawbacks, of course. Not being able to run the same software (Sage and some graphics packages being the main ones for us), and supporting two platforms takes more work and requires admins to have multiple skillsets and tools, but I really wouldn't class users as being the main problem in switching to linux in an office environment.
I would agree. A friend of mine suggested I try Mint a few months ago and brought over a Live CD.  That was Mint 15 and having installed it on the system and loved it, I have since upgraded to Mint 16 when that became available (thanks to bad apple for the excellent guide on avoiding the DVD based 'wipe the whole system' option). Aside from odd occasions when I need to pop into Windows 7 (dual-boot) I've barely touched Windows since.  While we are both experienced in IT, in the same period he has also migrated three other friends over to Mint, one with moderate IT ability, two who are average user capability.

Julian
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