I’ve got a new machine running Ubuntu and a very old laptop dual booting XP and Mint. The latter will go only Mint as I sort through all the legacy stuff and move what I need to keep.
Ping
You know this guy lost 99.999% of Windows users at the word “distro”, don’t you? And VM?
There are exactly two applications and only two, that require that I use Liunx, MS Project and MS Visio.
For MS Project there is ProjectLibre which is good enough for me but almost all of my customers us MS Project. I am thinking about switching over so this may not be an issue any longer.
For MS Visio there is Dia and yEd but neither support the stencils from network equipment manufactures. My only use of Visio is for network diagrams so this tends to make things really tough.
Otherwise, I have no need for Windows.
I dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows XP on a couple of older general-purpose computers, mainly for security reasons. It’s great for most applications, such as email & web browsing, and Libre Office gives very good compatibility with (most) popular Microsoft Office files. (I don’t play games, so that’s not even a consideration...)
There are a handful of music recording/production and video editing programs that I use, necessitating that I not entirely abandon Windows. Ironically, newer versions of some of these won’t run on XP, either. So I also have to have something running Win 7, 8 or 10.
I could try some of those XP programs in compatibility mode or in a VM, but I’m not sure about the performance hit I may take running in a VM.
I think Linux is a great choice for XP hangers-on who risk serious damage from the insecure nature of this now-abandoned OS, and have set-up machines for several of my friends to help protect them.
Practically speaking you either need to be someone with a great deal of linux knowledge or have reasonable access to someone who does.
Let’s face facts - when something goes wrong (and it will eventually - for example when I upgrade Fedora issues large and small are not unknown) you will need to noodle it out. Or for example just getting something like Pipelight (the linux Silverlight replacement) working. The average user isn’t going to be able to deal with problems over a certain complexity.
Windoze and apple will also have issues with their OS’s but there there is paid support model that people can avail themselves of.
With linux it’s figure it out yourself (usually with the help of Google), or ask someone to help you.
Don’t get me wrong - I love linux and use it all day every day. But to pretend that grandma or aunt millie can just hop on linux and use it effectively - no.