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by nivals 1160 days ago
Early Lindows employee here, great bit of nostalgia in that post.

On the other side of the dot-com bust there were a lot of hard things that the team achieved even if the adoption never hit.

For example, a $199 PC sold at Walmart was notable for the time. It offered a working desktop with a full productivity suite from first boot. Without opening terminal, updating a repo, dealing with sound card or video card driver issues, etc.
3 comments
kajecounterhack 1160 days ago
My dad bought this $200 computer for me and I tried to host a web based game I wrote on it! Ultimately I had to install Fedora Core 2 instead because I couldn’t get the lamp stack working. I remember wondering why Lindows didn’t have problems with graphics / drivers when FC did (what torturous debugging). Thanks for your work!
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JeremyNT 1160 days ago
I ran Debian at the time, but I worked in PC repair, and I remember being really excited about Linux being installed on PCs you could buy at a store.

It felt like there was a small "window" of opportunity where a competitor to MS might have been able to gain some traction. On those low end computers the "Windows tax" could amount to a large percentage of the overall cost.

Sadly I think Lindows was just a little too late to the table. People were already used to the proprietary software they had, and OpenOffice was new and junky - a tough sell for people used to the MS suite. IE was also dominant, and the browser situation on Linux was a real problem due to ActiveX and other IE-only things that kept kicking around for years.

I also think the "Lindows" name did it no favors with those of us who already ran Linux. I remember reading about it on slashdot, but I mostly discounted it for my own use because of the branding.

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simfree 1160 days ago
Linspire was a delightful OS to run! Truly, I feel like the major Linux distros never got to the same level as Linspire on friendliness and ease of use, the competition to Click-N-Run on modern Gnome Software Center just doesn't feel quite as easy at times.

There were so many edge cases on Windows and Linux at the time that Linspire sailed right past with nary an issue.

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