If you compare the prices for computers that come pre-installed with Linux, you can see that the Windows computers are actually less expensive and you could very well be paying thousands of dollars more over a lifetime for Linux in this situation.

Macs however. period

My desktop runs Ubuntu studio and has inkscape, scribus, openoffice and Lyx in daily use, not to mention GIMP and Hugin panorama software. So paid for versions would be something like Quark Xpress, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements). Not much change out of £1000 there, and upgrades every 3 years or so.

My laptop has Puredyne (a media distro based on Ubuntu) with (in weekly use) Ardour and plugins, Pure Data, and the humble Audacity. Paid for would be Logic, purchased plugins, MSP Max and something like sound edit 16 or the later versions. That’s another $1000+ with upgrades every 5 years or so (musicians are conservative with their software).

I feel richer already.

I agree though that XP SP3 with care will be usable for a long time on your existing hardware, and I have some existing hardware I hope will last a long time.

However when the hardware breaks, I suspect that some components will be hard to replace with new equivalents with drivers for XP, and that may force me off the platform.

I’m just hoping that by then, Wine will have cracked running Dragon Dictate. I think that’s the only Windows application I care at the moment.

by the way in calculating costs, the article omits the very real and extensive costs of time to replace your OS and resolve the resulting application issues. I did a big upgrade a few years ago- several thousand PCs to Windows XP- and the services costs exceeded the hardware and software costs by some way. If your OS (or your leasing contract) forces you to upgrade every three years, that’s a heck of a lot of cost to amortise.