“Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony was pretty gung-ho about the company’s upcoming release back in June. He said it would ‘fill some key holes in our current offering’. Unfortunately Linspire 6, released last week, lacks the refinements you’d expect in a distro you pay USD 50 to download. It drops some key distinguishing features, and in return gains only some Microsoft technology as spelled out in the Microsoft patent covenants Linspire agreed to. This release seems to be about deferring to Microsoft.”
I was a subscriber to Linspire/Lindows, it was actually my first foray into Linux. after a disastrous experiance with Redhat, Lindows was my testing machine for a while, migrating to Xandros for a time, then back for the 5-0 release, back and forth. I checked out Freespire, and the new Freespire 2.0 (Linspire 6’s free cousin) but none of them suit me anymore.
They used to have drive and direction, now they are another me too distro.
Sure they can read proprietary formats out of the “box” but hell, in one click I can to in Gutsy. Too much loss, not enough gain.
Sure they can read proprietary formats out of the “box” but hell, in one click I can to in Gutsy. Too much loss, not enough gain.
Sounds like Ubuntu is making life difficult for the commercial, newbie-friendly distros
Linspire has always been for people new to Linux who don’t “get” Linux yet. After the MS agreement, they are for people who will never “get” Linux.
I once talked with Michael Robertson at a promoting event for Lindows. He frankly told everyone who wanted to know that he got rich with mp3.com because he hopped on the mp3 wagon early enough in 1998. And that he he hopes the sames for his Linux company. This seems to be the only reason why this distro was created.
Then clearly he started on the wrong foot and never understood open source from the beginning.Cant feel too sorry for this distro then if its just a get rich quick scheme and not a labour of love.Laughable really,when the creator of Linux himself is not rich from his own creation but still not on some street corner begging quarters.
Linus has to be worth in the $20-100 million range from all the Red Hat stock he was given as a gift during their IPO. By the time the Linux kernel becomes self-aware, he’ll be in reasonable shape for retirement, even by American standards.
Well-deserved.
I thought this was rather interesting relating to Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=577927
That guy is an attention whore if ever I saw one. I agree with others comments that suggest that he hopped on the Linux bandwagon hoping to hit it big. While Linux just may be the “next big thing” yet, it’s hardly a viable route to get rich quick. Nevertheless, I’m glad Mr. Cormony has found a home at Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical seems to know how to leverage marketing to its advantage. Personally, I don’t care how or who as long as Linux eventually gets its dues.
Carmony is probably more of a natural at marketing than Shuttleworth, but the conventional rules don’t apply to Linux. Shuttleworth understands that the Linux market isn’t simply a matter of providing a quality product. It’s driven by a vocal cadre of lead users who base their loyalties as much on philosophy as they do on quality.
Success in this space is predicated on clearly articulating a vision that resonates with the core of the community. Carmony set out to cultivate demand for an unabashedly “mixed-source” Linux distribution. I’m certain that this demand exists, but that’s a pitch to reserve for business and OEM clients. The community-facing marketing effort has to be a crowd-pleaser.
I suggested a couple months ago that Linspire should just let go and let the community develop the distro.
I am sure it would do much better than a salaried company to produce a distro whose only advantage is a couple pre-installed propietary formats and codecs which can be installed on other distros with a click of a mouse button.
Hell, Linspire dont even have a 3-d desktop on default install with wallpaper looking like Mandrake 8.2 . Just referencing and not trolling since I use Mandriva on my server and I liked Mandrake 8.2.
I dont see Linspire lasting another 2 years with distros like Ubuntu,OpenSuse,Mandriva and Fedora who are making more significant strides with each release.Plus they are “smaller” distros who are very damned newbie friendly.
Oh, enough already, leave the 3D desktop alone, people. Honestly, if only that was the only thing wrong with Linspire. 3D desktops are just a fad, good for showing off and that’s all. Do you honestly get anything done with all the effects swirling around all the time, or do you only turn them on once in a blue moon, to show your friends?
The lack of a 3D desktop is the least of Linspire’s issues. I’d say that not having a working package manager installed by default is a far bigger problem. This isn’t Slackware, mind you, it’s supposed to target desktop n00bs.
But I don’t see what the big surprise is, anyway. Ever since the terms of the deal with Microsoft became known people have predicted that Microsoft will use them to do some very bad things to Linspire. Here it is, a distro stripped of almost everything it used to set it apart.
Umm, actually I DO get a lot of work done with my 3D desktop, thank you very much. I can easily navigate my virtual desktops with a flick of my mouse or my keyboard. Both Cube and Wall offer fast and efficient management of multiple desktops. My myriad of open windows and applications can be tamed by alt-tab (or fancier) Win-Tab. I won’t even tell you how useful the ‘expose’ feature (shamelessly stolen from the Mac) is or the thumbnail previews that appear when I hover over a minimized window or application. The grouping feature allows many windows to appear as one that changes as it’s spun around. The various transparency effects help to distinguish recently active windows from those that haven’t been focussed for awhile. Finally, the speed and crispness of the 3D desktop greatly enhances my work flow. In summary, while it’s true that not all of the effects have an intended purpose, many in fact DO. So if you don’t want to use a 3D desktop yourself, fine! Who are you to judge whether or not it’s useful for others?
Edited 2007-10-18 00:05
If it tickles your fancy, so be it, don’t get your panties in a bunch. But I find your claims highly dubious.
As opposed to what? Don’t non-3D workspace switches work the same (mouse or keyboard)?
Are you kidding me? I doubt it’s faster to render 3D effects as an animation then simply switch a desktop instantly. By the time the cube has rotated to one desktop you can cycle all of them in a non-animated workspace switcher.
And as for efficient, don’t make me laugh. How is it more efficient to waste additional machine resources? Oh, you meant you are more efficient? OK, if efficient to you means “I’ll wait for this pretty animation to show instead of getting work done”.
I can’t imagine how I’d ever come to have any use for any of these effects. It’s always faster and more intuitive to actually flip windows or workspaces. But I’m glad you like them, it means the programmers didn’t work for nothing.
Yeah, and my wooden fiber desktop greatly enchances my upper verticality body position and thus does wonders for my productivity. What is this, the TV shopping channel?
I dont use 3D desktops either but its a standard.If the leading distros have it and you want to gain more mindshare along with some marketshare you have to compete on similar standards or then you just trying to appeal to a niche audience.Linspire isn’t niche.
Otherwise I agree with everything you said
You mean linux.com doesn’t like Linspire and was predisposed to dumping on the distro because of Microsoft? Say it ain’t so!
I used Linspire for about 3 months, with the original Five-O release. I’m not a big KDE fan, but it was a decent, although somewhat dated system. Linspire’s prize achievement however would be Click N Run. CNR is a front-end for apt, but does a great job at making installing software easy for the newbie. However, I think with the Add/Remove front-end to Synaptic or even using Synaptic is very newbie friendly as well, and the categories are a lot more organized in Ubuntu. I can’t say a whole lot about Kevin Harmony, except he seems to do a decent job in the marketing area. I appreciate that he has chosen Ubuntu as his current distro, and I hope that he can bring something of value to Ubuntu’s Community forums. I do agree with the fact that Linspire needs to quit, and let Freespire replace it, and let the community work together on it. And honestly, it’s been at least what 2 years, since Linspire has had a version release? It doesn’t take long to get left behind in the linux world today. There are hundreds of distros that keep much more up to date, and they are community driven. The people at Linspire are getting a salary, and for what? So that 2 years later, they can deliver a system, that can do exactly what the other community distros can do? I too can install proprietary codecs in Ubuntu with one click, or if I want bleeding edge technology, I can install Sabayon, based on gentoo, and have them already installed, and have a bleeding edge system. In some cases, I think a consolidation of distros is needed. How many variants based on debian, do we really need, if none of them offer anything that we can’t get somewhere else?
Yes CNR was great in its day … however you have other One Klick install systems now like Klik and the openSUSE built service / one-click install, there is nothing really that Linspire has to offer over other Linux distributions, even less so, now that they are using Ubuntu as a Base …
Another dead distro. Time for Linspire, Micheal Robertson and the rest of the crew to just go away.
>”Another dead distro. Time for Linspire, Micheal Robertson and the rest of the crew to just go away.”
Why? They brought some people over from Windows, contributed money to a handful of OSS projects, and the people that didn’t like the distro never had to use it.
If you check his account, you will see that he is only a poor, little troll. It is not worth discussing things with him.
I know, it’s off topic, but still true.
If you’re a newcomer: SUSE, Ubuntu.
If you’re a pro: Debian, Slackware, Gentoo etc.
The rest is probably in between somewhere.
I don’t know where people keep coming up with these lists. There are a lot of newbie Gentoo users, and there are a lot of “pro” Ubuntu users. SuSe is an enterprise server distribution for a lot of people, and you don’t even list Fedora or RedHat which is possibly the enterprise distro.
right.. and if you are really a pro and trying to keep a buttload of servers and desktops up, you certainly have time to do dependency checking and compile all your software.. please.. this argument is senseless.(yeah i know with gentoo its emerge.. and slack has its own tgz packages.. but to say that a pro would used debian and a newb use ubuntu is seriously erroneous.
The problem with Linspire, as with a lot of these types of distributions and tech companies like Xandros, is that they never looked at the software they are using from the ground up and looked at what they needed to do with it to move forwards. Sadly, a lot of these distros think that signing some deal with Microsoft to be able to read some meaningless formats, which have quite a bit of support in existing free libraries anyway, is the sole key to success.
They just seem to have completely ran out of ideas, as has Ubuntu really, and a lot of distributors to be honest. The only distro that has recently produced anything moderately useful is the OpenSuse community, not Novell that is, and their build service and backports are excellent.
Everybody else, quite frankly, doesn’t interest me in the slightest, and people are getting excited about a lot of things that don’t really mean very much such as unstable ‘bling’ effects in a new window manager and incremental improvements that no one ever really sees from release to release.
The future for commercial Linux distributors, certainly on the desktop, is pretty bleak because there is a lot of inertia considering the current installed base, and a big part of the attraction is getting a Linux distribution for free and installing it where you want.
Edited 2007-10-18 11:24
You seem not to be quite aware of the contributions and innovations made by the Fedora project.
You seem not to be quite aware of the contributions and innovations made by the Fedora project.
Fedora do a lot of good work, and I use Fedora Directory Server, but I don’t use Fedora very much as my main desktop or server really.
The problem with Linspire, as with a lot of these types of distributions and tech companies like Xandros, is that they never looked at the software they are using from the ground up and looked at what they needed to do with it to move forwards. Sadly, a lot of these distros think that signing some deal with Microsoft …, is the sole key to success. … They just seem to have completely ran out of ideas.
I suspect the reason is simpler. Ubuntu ate Linspire’s lunch and the lunch of a lot of other hopefuls. Ubuntu boiled it all down to a single and above all free silver platter that worked from here to Jakarta and back. Their publicity was extremely effective as were their support forums, and they succeeded in capturing word-of-mouth approval from sysadmins, developers, IT folks and others in a position to swing things. Linspire and a host of others never came anywhere near this. It is not just a matter of apps and innovation. People pushing for something is just as if not more important.
As it happens I’m no fan of Ubuntu or of Gnome since I dislike evangelism and the intolerance that always goes with it (Debian and Opensuse plus KDE here). But kudos where kudos are due. Ubuntu thought it all through a lot more thoroughly than others: Linspire and their ilk are now paying the price of an inferior business plan. There never was a credible niche for their brand of pay-for Linux.
I suspect the reason is simpler. Ubuntu ate Linspire’s lunch and the lunch of a lot of other hopefuls.
I really don’t think there was any lunch there to eat in the first place. I’m just not impressed with what Ubuntu are doing to be honest.
Edited 2007-10-18 14:33
Actually, while Xandros isn’t my cup of tea, they strike me as being one of the only distros that does “get it”. They have some pretty powerful tools for managing both linux and Windows servers, integrate with ActiveX, have licensed the protocols for Exchange integration, etc. They get what their target market is, and they’re not pandering to “The Community(tm)” in doing so.
I scratch my head over this, when I see Xandros pursuing interoperability with enterprise networks, and Novell working on music players and flickr uploaders (though don’t get me wrong, openSUSE is my distro of choise).
Xandros beats to their own drum, and as much as people keep claiming they won’t last because they don’t embrace “The Community(tm)” and offer free software left and right, that argument has lasted several years now which means they’re doing something right. Linspire, on the other hand, constantly sought approval from, basically, everyone. Windows users, “The Community(tm)”, business customers, Shuttleworth. Anything for a buck.
I certainly won’t be moving to Xandros any time soon, but I think that any distro looking at the possibility of commercial success should at least consider their model, and have the cajones to pick their market and stick to it instead of trying to be everything to everyone. There’s something to be said for that, at least from a business POV.
Edited 2007-10-20 03:42 UTC
“Well, after all my research, I have to tell you, it was an easy choice. Ubuntu! I’m excited for the new release in a few days, which I will use to replace the many Linux desktop and laptop PCs I own (five).”
Uh … as ex-CEO of LinSpire, wasn’t it Kevin’s job to create an exciting version of Linux? Apparently he failed at his job since even he isn’t interested in using LinSpire anymore? That’s what I get out of this. He wasn’t able to do his job. Did he leave voluntarily? Did he jump ship before he got fired? What does the company have to show for him being at the helm for however long he was there?
Use Freespire instead. Either one though crashes routinely and freezes so often its maddening. Otherwise its fast, even bootup is amazing how fast it is.
The crashes and freezes are show stoppers though. I plan on trying out Ub. 7.1 and OpenSuse 10.3 this week.