Luis Ibáñez works as Senior Software Engineer at Google Inc in Chicago. Opinions expressed in this site are his own.You can find him in github at: http://www.github.com/luisibanezand in twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/luisibanezHe previously worked as a Technical Leader at Kitware Inc., and Director of Open Source Community Development at the Open Source EHR Agent (OSEHRA). At Kitware he was closely involved in the development of open source software for medical imaging applications, in particular, working with the Insight Toolkit (ITK).Luis is a strong supporter of Open Access, and one of the editors of the Insight Journal, an OA Journal that enforces the verification of reproducibility. In collaboration with other instructors, Luis taught a course on Open Source Software Practices at RPI between 2007 and 2013, and also at the State University of New York at Albany between 2011 and 2014.Luis Ibáñez received a B.S. in Physics from the Universidad Industrial de Santander (Bucaramanga, Colombia) in 1989 and a M.S. in Optics from the same university in 1994. He received a D.E.A and Ph.D. degrees from the Universite de Rennes I (Rennes, France) in 1995 and 2000, respectively. In 1999, Luis Ibáñez joined the Division of Neurosurgery of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and participated as a member of the MIDAG and CADDLab groups. His work at UNC was related to the development of algorithms for 2 and 3D registration applied to image guided surgery. He also participated as developer of the INSIGHT Registration and Segmentation Toolkit sponsored by the National Library of Medicine. Luis Ibáñez joined Kitware, Inc. in February 2002 where he was one of the main developers of the Insight Toolkit (ITK) coordinating its maintenance with other developers and the user community; he is also one of the main developers of the Image Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK) and participated in crafting the operational principles of the Insight Journal. Luis Ibáñez is a strong supporter of Open Access, and the verification of reproducibility in scientific publications and is a regular speaker in ITK training courses, and in events disseminating the principles of Open Source. In August 2014, Luis joined Google Inc as Software Engineer, to work with the corporate engineering team in New York city.
Authored Comments
Yes, that's a good point.
Here is the Release schedule for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TrustyTahr/ReleaseSchedule
April 17th is the expected release date.
How timely ! :-)
AI,
Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
You bring up a very good point.
Let me reduce the suggestion to two specific cases:
1) For the personal user of Windows XP (e.g. home / student / home office):
I would suggest to try Linux Mint. (http://www.linuxmint.com/).
It has a very simple installation (about 20 minutes), and a very clean and simple Desktop interface.
It is even possible in Mint to install a theme that looks similar to the Windows XP Desktop theme (http://www.itworld.com/software/401399/install-windows-xp-theme-linux-mint-16)
2) For enterprise users, who are using Windows XP to run business and maybe dealing with mission critical data:
Then the Red Hat Enterprise Linux is probably the best option.
This is typically what will be used by government agencies, healthcare and financial institutions.
Note that in both cases, most of your Windows XP programs will not work directly on Linux. However, you will certainly find equivalent applications that provide the same functionalities. For example, instead of Microsoft Office, you will be able to use OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and instead of Photoshop, you can use Inkscape and GIMP.
If you have specific applications in mind, please share them with us in the comments, and we will be happy to write follow up articles pointing you to the equivalent applications that provide the same functionalities under Linux.