6 ms·

As it is, an alarming number are still hanging on to Windows XP or Windows 7 tooth and nail. When those folks do move, they seem more likely to move to smartpho

As it is, an alarming number are still hanging on to Windows XP or Windows 7 tooth and nail. When those folks do move, they seem more likely to move to smartphones, tablets or Chromebooks. I wonder how we can make the transition be towards Linux for the average user. We moved my retired parents from Win7 to Ubuntu, and they're doing just fine (other than printer drivers). For most people's uses, Linux is a perfectly reasonable and functionally complete alternative to Win7 or XP.

CmonDev 13y ago
"We moved my retired parents from Win7 to Ubuntu, and they're doing just fine (other than printer drivers)" They will be happy with anything you are enthusiastic about that is lawful and is not harmful to your health.
- jamesgeck0 13y ago
  I dunno, you should have heard my dad after I upgraded him from Office '97 to Office 2007. Until that point, I was convinced that the ribbon was the some of the best UI Microsoft ever did...
andrewfong 13y ago
> other than printer drivers That's surprisingly important to the average user.
- bryanlarsen 13y ago
  There are also a good number of older printers out there that aren't supported by the latest versions of Windows but are supported in Linux. Some didn't make the jump to NT/XP, and some didn't make the jump to Vista/7/8.
  - jamesgeck0 13y ago
    My father seems to have the knack of buying printers and scanners that don't transition between Windows versions. I had no idea that printer drivers could break between Windows 7 and Windows 8, but they did. He began emailing documents to himself and printing from his Windows 7 laptop. About six months after Windows 8 was released, HP finally released a supposedly compatible driver for his printer. Upon installation of the driver, the system detected the same printer twice, and neither of the detected devices worked. Additionally, every application I tried printing from crashed as soon as the printer dialog appeared. The situation was resolved when we discovered that HP has a Windows 8 compatible generic postscript driver that works with just about everything.
- freehunter 13y ago
  There's one machine in my house that I could run Linux on full time. Unfortunately, that's the machine my printer is hooked up to, and Lexmark refuses to make a printer driver for Linux for that model. I didn't go out and buy a new printer, I reinstalled Windows.
ForHackernews 13y ago
> For most people's uses, Linux is a perfectly reasonable and functionally complete alternative to Win7 or XP. As long as they don't watch Netflix. Or play games. Or have any unsupported peripherals. Or want to use any commercial consumer software.
- bane 13y ago
  In other words, so long as the typical user doesn't need to do typical user things, it's perfectly fine.
- gnoway 13y ago
  Netflix doesn't work out of the box, but does work with Pipelight and a browser user-agent override. Ease of setup approaches trivial. In my experience it's stable. The rest of your complaints are valid right now. I expect the game situation is going to change because of what Valve's doing w/ SteamOS.
  - freehunter 13y ago
    I just searched for Pipelight. I found boat and trailer lights, something called FDS Team, eBay results, and something from the Arch wiki about Silverlight. Nothing about Netflix. How is this trivial? On Windows, I can go to Netflix.com and it starts working. Even if it needs Silverlight, it installs it for your automatically. Users don't know what Silverlight is. They don't want to search through Arch's wiki. They certainly don't want to figure out what the hell a browser user-agent override is. In reality, Netflix doesn't work on Linux.
    - simoncion 13y ago
      Netflix does work on Linux in the same way that a program written for a device that doesn't yet have a C compiler does work. To wit: Netflix is (currently) harder to use on every Linux distribution than it is on Windows and Mac. It's probably too much hassle to be worth it for non-tech folks, but it does work.
venomsnake 13y ago
I don't know how we can make it. Yesterday I had to give old laptop to a friend to use for a few days. She wanted one thing from the laptop - remote desktop client to connect to her main machine. I used mint. After 30 minutes of trying to find suitable gui for rdesktop that does not require touching console just threw XP.

CmonDev 13y ago

"We moved my retired parents from Win7 to Ubuntu, and they're doing just fine (other than printer drivers)" They will be happy with anything you are enthusiastic about that is lawful and is not harmful to your health.

jamesgeck0 13y ago
I dunno, you should have heard my dad after I upgraded him from Office '97 to Office 2007. Until that point, I was convinced that the ribbon was the some of the best UI Microsoft ever did...

andrewfong 13y ago

> other than printer drivers That's surprisingly important to the average user.

bryanlarsen 13y ago
There are also a good number of older printers out there that aren't supported by the latest versions of Windows but are supported in Linux. Some didn't make the jump to NT/XP, and some didn't make the jump to Vista/7/8.
- jamesgeck0 13y ago
  My father seems to have the knack of buying printers and scanners that don't transition between Windows versions. I had no idea that printer drivers could break between Windows 7 and Windows 8, but they did. He began emailing documents to himself and printing from his Windows 7 laptop. About six months after Windows 8 was released, HP finally released a supposedly compatible driver for his printer. Upon installation of the driver, the system detected the same printer twice, and neither of the detected devices worked. Additionally, every application I tried printing from crashed as soon as the printer dialog appeared. The situation was resolved when we discovered that HP has a Windows 8 compatible generic postscript driver that works with just about everything.
freehunter 13y ago
There's one machine in my house that I could run Linux on full time. Unfortunately, that's the machine my printer is hooked up to, and Lexmark refuses to make a printer driver for Linux for that model. I didn't go out and buy a new printer, I reinstalled Windows.

ForHackernews 13y ago

> For most people's uses, Linux is a perfectly reasonable and functionally complete alternative to Win7 or XP. As long as they don't watch Netflix. Or play games. Or have any unsupported peripherals. Or want to use any commercial consumer software.

bane 13y ago
In other words, so long as the typical user doesn't need to do typical user things, it's perfectly fine.
gnoway 13y ago
Netflix doesn't work out of the box, but does work with Pipelight and a browser user-agent override. Ease of setup approaches trivial. In my experience it's stable. The rest of your complaints are valid right now. I expect the game situation is going to change because of what Valve's doing w/ SteamOS.
- freehunter 13y ago
  I just searched for Pipelight. I found boat and trailer lights, something called FDS Team, eBay results, and something from the Arch wiki about Silverlight. Nothing about Netflix. How is this trivial? On Windows, I can go to Netflix.com and it starts working. Even if it needs Silverlight, it installs it for your automatically. Users don't know what Silverlight is. They don't want to search through Arch's wiki. They certainly don't want to figure out what the hell a browser user-agent override is. In reality, Netflix doesn't work on Linux.
  - simoncion 13y ago
    Netflix does work on Linux in the same way that a program written for a device that doesn't yet have a C compiler does work. To wit: Netflix is (currently) harder to use on every Linux distribution than it is on Windows and Mac. It's probably too much hassle to be worth it for non-tech folks, but it does work.

venomsnake 13y ago

I don't know how we can make it. Yesterday I had to give old laptop to a friend to use for a few days. She wanted one thing from the laptop - remote desktop client to connect to her main machine. I used mint. After 30 minutes of trying to find suitable gui for rdesktop that does not require touching console just threw XP.