Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

Presumably if they had could switch OSes easily, they would have switched from Windows XP to Windows 7 by now.

XP was released in 2001. If they'd adopted Red Hat they'd have adopted 7, and upgraded 22 times, changing distro once to be on Fedora 20. If they'd adopted Ubuntu they'd have had to wait 3 years for the first release (confusingly numbered 4.10), and now they'd be on release 13. Even Red Hat Enterprise Linux didn't become available until 2002, and you'd be on version 2.1, unsupported since 2009.

If you suck at upgrading and want something that will be supported for 12+ years, Linux is not for you.

View on HN

Ubuntu's version numbering system is not confusing at all, it just doesn't follow the standard start with 1 and go up. Ubuntu's version numbering system is the date the version got released, so 4.10 got released in October 2004, and version 14.04 (which gets released in 4 days) means that is is released in April 2014. Not so confusing at all.

Edit: Anyway your point is invalid anyway. The reason the IRS suck at upgrading is because they didn't have the budget to pay for said upgrade. Last I heard, it was free to upgrade the majority of Linux distros. Although there may be many other reasons not to switch to Linux, this is not one of them.

Do you live in a world where linux just magically upgrades itself on 110,000 computers for free?

Er ... yes?

http://imgur.com/omXommu

(Except the "110,000 computers" bit, this is just one.)

The 110,000 computers bit was the only bit that mattered.

Who runs this UI on 110,000 computers?

There's a lot more to the cost of upgrading than the price of the license. Licenses for Win7 are nothing compared to the price of upgrading all the custom software they developed over the years to insure compatibility with a new OS. The reason almost no business or organism decided to leave XP for Linux is because it's not economically advantageous to do so. When talking about an investment as big as this, you can be sure that almost every options have been evaluated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com