[belorn]

Whatever hardware that is running that 12.04 system can be upgraded, free of charge, for likely the next 20 years if the past 20 years of linux is anything to go by.

Even if you pay money for the windows 10, it is unlikely to even start on the hardware that XP ran on. Not only will the people have to go through the budget to pay for the software, but now you need a full upgrade plan.

To put this in a concrete example. If a hospital had a check-in system running 12.04 they could just take someone internal from IT and go and fix it. If it was Windows XP then they need to go through finance, then get a offers from competing companies, fitting the upgrading into the budget, and last have people installing it in each of the hospitals entrances. The first case has a project length of days and the other of months and in worst case years.

[thecosas]

I understand the argument, but I think "just take someone internal from IT and go and fix it" is vastly oversimplifying the skills/manpower/time required for doing something like this.

[belorn]

I can only speak of my own experience as a sysadmin, but the more isolated the system is and the less critical it is for operation, the easier it is to delegate the job of doing a software update to coworkers and new hire. Especially if all the issues from doing an update has already been established on several other machines, in which case the update is more or less mechanical in nature.

It reminds me of the story about a thirty year old Commodore Amiga running the AC system for a school district. The district finally decided to modernize the AC for $2 million, but until then it was just cheaper and easier to continue paying a person to run it every year. Replacing hardware systems is expensive and political complicated, while continuing paying an employee is just status quo.