Time to leave XP?

[damndave]

I was on XP for a lonnnnnng time. Just switched my desktop and laptop over to Windows 7 and love it. My 2gb of ram had to go up to 4gb though. It ran fine, but seemed sluggish at times.

[chris]

i loved XP but it did show it's age when comes to games which i play on my PC. i did upgrade to Win7 Ultimate. love it. works great no issues at all. there are somethings that i have to get used to after using XP for so many years. XP was and is a solid OS. why Microsoft made Vista is beyond me.

[ChaparralCommando]

I'm still using XP and I'm planning on continuing to use it until support ends in 2014. I will then most likely move to one of the Linux variants like Ubuntu. I use Mac OSX and Windows 7 on the school computers, and I despise both. I don't use MS office (OpenOffice.org FTW!) or most MS products unless I have to, so leaving Windows is not going to be a big deal I'm hoping. No way I'm buying a Mac though.

[Coded-Dude]

i'm still not sure if Oracle is gonna keep open office around. I still use it some, but I'm starting to transition to google docs.

[jmlivingston]

OpenOffice has already been forked, the variant is called LibreOffice and has been getting quite a few rave reviews recently.

[NSR500]

When Ubuntu 11 comes out I'll probably give LibreOffice a shot. Right now OpenOffice is doing the job I need it to.
Ubuntu 11 will be interesting with it's move to Unity.

[locosway]

When Ubuntu 11 comes out I'll probably give LibreOffice a shot. Right now OpenOffice is doing the job I need it to.
Ubuntu 11 will be interesting with it's move to Unity.

I really don't like the direction Ubuntu is going. Maybe this is what Linux needs, what Ubuntu is doing, but it's not my Linux anymore. I guess this is the reason I'm moving back to either Debian or Arch.

[Coded-Dude]

i was always an opensuse fan....until the MS partnership and subsequent sell-off.

[Bryansix]

I'm not upgrading XP on this machine but my new hardware build will be running Windows 7.

I hate hate hate Vista. We do small business IT and Vista blows. The UAC is always intruding (fixed to annoy you less in Win 7) and a lot of things still don't work correctly like permissions to run things from certain folders or file transfers etc. Vista was a hack job. Windows 7 was Microsoft saying "we'll do it right this time. Sorry.".

[SupportGeek]

Let me ask you this, how many Linux distributions are FIPS certified? I know there's Redhat but what else? I know it is hard to adapt to change but the fact is that Windows is quite secure these days. Sure, you have to worry about what the end user does but they will always be a security risk on any system.

It doesnt matter. My understanding is that since 2.4 Kernel every Linux distro crypto API is 100% FIPS 140-2 compliant, the problem is validation.
Linux kernel development occurs rapidly compared to the glacial pace of other OS's, when you look at how FIPS certification is obtained, it validates with very specific builds and revisions, meaning that in order to maintain FIPS certification on the kernel code, it would have to be re-validated over and over again, multiple times a year, (there have been 5 stable releases of the Kernel this year alone) an expensive process, especially since Torvalds would be the one handing over the cash since he is the maintainer of current builds.
Some distros of Linux can lock in and obtain FIPS certification if it is important, AFAIK some federal versions do this, but they would need to update in a very controlled way, probably every 3-6 months depending on the budget to re-validate and maintain certification.

That said, in my house, I have a vista box, a Win 7 box and 2 ubuntu boxes in the house, everyone that has used the ubuntu boxes are surprised at how fast they are, and were actually able to figure out how to use them faster than the win 7 box.
Ive had to rebuild the vista box once because of a web based trojan (antivirus 2008 or whatever it was called) and Ive had to remove a few issues that appeared on both the vista and 7 boxes, I havnt had to do a thing to the ubuntu boxes, as they are completely unaffected by any of the windows malware/spyware floating around out there. Windows is FAR more secure than it was in XP, it still has a ways to go to match the security of a properly configured linux box.