Submitted by LinuxPlanet reports – Once known as a community-supported alternative to the Linspire distribution, the Freespire name is about to rise again from the ashes of obscurity–only this time as a distro completely sponsored and endorsed by Linspire itself… Freespire will be a Debian-based, community-driven and -supported project tied to the commercial Linspire distribution, Carmony outlined, in much the same way as Fedora Core and openSUSE relate to their parent commercial distros, Red Hat Linux and SUSE Linux, respectively. OSDir has some screenshots of Freespire in the Freespire 5.0 Screenshot Tour.
Freespire 5.0 Screenshot Tour
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Those are from the previous release that was never intended to see the light of public day, not the one that all the foofarah is about. Those come from the aborted project of “jaceman”.
The menu structure seams to be build in such a way, that it mimics Windows.
I could not live with that kind of simplification. I know, I know… I am the execption. Normal user will probably like the menu structure of Freespire.
Anyway… while looking at the screenshots, I realized how overblown my stock KDE 3.5.2 (installed on Gentoo) menu structure is.
Freespire was released some time ago but was a project by a Linspire user and never was supported by Linspire as explained by Kevin Carmony himself. Those shots are from that project which then became SquigleOS. Now the founder of the first Freespire release was told by Linspire of their new project and he joined them now on the real/company supported Freespire version. Now what I’d like to discuss, this is once again proof that giving back to the community works more than having a closed product only developed behind closed doors. Novell realized this and thats when OpenSuSE came out, and look, now SuSE is more popular than it ever was. So Kudos to Linspire and their new project, maybe I would never use it but I hope it gets a great community behind it. Also I like to point out that the freespire website is worth a good look and read the FAQ, is interesting that Freespire will also support/have available 3rd party legal propietary software available.
SteveB – LinSpire is for Windows users switching to Linux. These people need the most comfortable environment in moving over. They NEED something familiar and not something different. The more Linux is like Windows for them the better. All they need to know is that it costs a lot less, has very few if any viruses, and is just as easy to use as Windows.
If you don’t fit that profile. Then you are correct that you are not their audience.
Just in case you don’t know. Probably 80% of Windows users fit the above. THEY are the target LinSpire is going after. So … 80% of 95% of computer users is their target.
(Windows currently has 95% of new OS on new computer sales in the U.S. Hopefully this is something that won’t be close to true two years from now.)
@Sabon: No problem with me. I have nothing against LinSpire or FreeSpire or against Windows
I only realized how simple the menu structure in FreeSpire is and how overblown my stock KDE 3.5.2 menu structure is. That’s all.
I am not negativly judging FreeSpire because of it’s simplicity in the menu structure.
“The more Linux is like Windows for them the better. All they need to know is that it costs a lot less, has very few if any viruses, and is just as easy to use as Windows.”
In other words: keep the user stupid with a dumbed down OS so that they can’t rediscover how their computer works and be in charge of their own computer. This way the user remains dependent on the OS provider for everything, keep doing that and she’ll accept DRM on everything to the point where they are in essense renting everything at purchase price.
Linspire is no longer Linux – period.
The question is – is there anything wrong with that? Not at all as long as they build their own OS like Be did, But they are stealing FOSS and charging for it then have ceased trying to use pressure on hardware vendors to open source things and instead have gone the route of pressuring for binary. I don’t think most of us have a problem with that when it comes to video card companies that have stood the test of time like ATI and Nvidia have but wireless products and even printers are a mess this way and there’s a higher chance of them going away someday leaving you without drivers in the future. THAT’S just one reason for the open source demands.
Those are actually SquiggleOS 5.0 screenshots, correctly labelled Linspire 5.0 (for their time)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ !!
Groklaw has a very interesting article concerning Freespire on its front page.
<a href=”hhttp://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060424164142296“>link…
Groklaw’s wrong here though:
“and as to why it’s taken them so long to do “Free”spire, here’s their thinking: A free version of Linspire has been a long time in coming, Carmony said, but there’s a reason why his company has waited until now to implement the project. Simply put, Linspire did not feel the market was ready for a community-driven distro that included proprietary software.”
the real reason is because they can’t keep up with all the latest hardware support like Ubuntu can. So this way they turn to the community to develop it, then rip it off and sell an “oem” version pre-installed on pc’s. The last couple months they’ve carefully orchestrated and trained their apologists aka “Insiders” to start saying that Linspire is specifically for OEM built computers with it pre-installed. Read the forums you can see it everywhere now when people report that (again) Linspire fails to install or work properly on their rig some insider pops up and tells them they should have bought a pc with it pre-installed instead.
interesting right :s.
Carmony has got a point: if you get windows users to use openoffice you’ve acclomplished a hack of a lot.
This distro is more free then others who push their opinion on other people, if you want nothing but open-source you can get it with this distro, if you want to use proprietary (which everybody does, even with distro’s like ubuntu who claim to pursue nothing but openness, which they do), you can use it with one click, no more burden with nvidia drivers needed to be installed afterwards (like in windows), no more codecs to hunt and install afterwards (like in windows), no office suits to look for (like in windows), you can even get cedega or transgaming installed and working, and you get a discount on these programs. I’m using Kubuntu, and though I like it, CNR adressess some needs, and the thing about choosing your hardware drivers: proprietary if they are available could be usefull there. But well, I’m gonna try it, but I don’t think I’m their target (like almost none of the current linux users is), and I don’t think I’m gonna stick.
Who gets a laugh out of there being plans to release a version of Linspire that uses Synaptic instead of CnR…
…when just weeks ago we heard that CnR may be ported to Ubuntu?
Wheels within wheels?