The Free World: Linspire.

Regular readers may recall that I recently gave Arch Linux a try. It didn’t work out for me (likely because I’m not one of the ‘competent users’ that Arch Linux is designed for), but it left me with a nice empty partition just screaming for a new distro to try out. I was pretty sure that I would end up back at my beloved Kanotix at the end of the day, but before I did that I wanted to try something. I’ve had a Linspire 5.0 CD lying around the house since June that I’ve never really checked out. I ran the Live portion of it once and thought it was pretty, but no great shakes. This time, since I had that shiny empty partition, I decided to install the full deal.

I’ve been running Linspire for 3 days now. That’s a good period of time to give it a whirl, use it heavily, and really check out how well it works. Now that the three days are over, it’s time to uninstall it and get back to the real GNU/Linux world. The funny thing is that I don’t want to.

It would take someone all of about three minutes to zoom around my personal blog, the GNU/Linux User Show blog, and various other sites on the Internet to come up with several quotes (and even sound bites) of me castigating Linspire. I generally have a very low opinion of ‘pay’ GNU/Linux distros because I think the damn thing should be free to home users. I don’t mind enterprise editions of GNU/Linux having a cost attached to them because let’s face it – businesses want the support, training, and manuals that big guys like Red Hat and others provide, but home use? That’s just wrong. I think one of my favourite quotes (and I’ve repeated it frequently) is that Linspire is the most ‘perverted’ of home distros because of the pay model, the abrupt departure from its Debian roots, its obvious intentional mimicry of the Windows desktop, and its quasi-proprietary CNR file repository.

But damnit, the thing just works! This is the third distro that I’ve successfully run on my laptop since converting to GNU/Linux over a year ago. More importantly, this is the first distro that I didn’t have to tweak anything to get it working. Video, sound, keyboard, mouse, wifi card!, USB ports, suspend!, and everything else just worked right out of the box. The only thing I had to do was plunk in my wifi router WEP password.

Suspend! Oh my God….I’ve really missed suspend since I left Windows.

And yes, I’m aware that 1% of advanced GNU/Linux users are able to get suspend working on their laptops, but despite repeated attempts, I’m just not one of those 1%.

I was still reticent about the CNR Warehouse. After my relatively recent experience with Kubuntu packages that gave me all sort of grief, I entered the CNR expecting to find 60 mainstream (read: nothing a blogger or podcaster would need), useless, and broken applications hanging around the place. I was kind of wrong, though. OK, I was very wrong. I’ve found every package I’ve looked for so far (barring OOo 2.0 which was promised two days ago so it should appear soon):

• alien
• Audacity
• Skype
• Nano
• Digikam
• Firefox (1.07 – granted)
• GFtp
• GIMP
• No Machine NX Client
• Quake II
• Wifi sniffer
• OOo (1.1.4 – granted)

Now granted, a lot of those applications are pretty mainstream and darn well should be in the CNR (like Firefox and DigiKam), but I was pleasantly surprised to see Audacity and the No Machine NX client and I was flabbergasted to see alien and nano.

So…where do I go from here? Good question. It’s still early, but I think I understand where all that money goes now. Whenever I hear someone like Peter van der Linden spouting off about how ‘easy’ Linspire is, and how it just installs perfectly, and how the CNR is ‘vast repository of vertified programs’ I want to puke. What I hear is ‘We’ve tweaked some stuff in a mainstream distro that makes it work better on one of our 4 supported test machines. We then scoured the Internet for what appeared to be the 20 most popular Linux applications and tweaked them and put them on a web page that we call the CNR.’

But I can’t argue with the end results. It really was the most painless install ever, the CNR really is vastly populated, and I literally click a single button to install an application. Dang…that’s easy.

Now to the nitty-gritty. Linspire was nice enough to give me a free, full copy and what appears to be a permanent CNR Gold membership last summer. The did this under their ‘press’ agreement because I am the host The GNU/Linux User Show. Those two items combined would have cost me $100US with a recurring yearly fee (for the CNR Gold membership) of $50US ( a regular CNR membership is $20US/year). For reference, the Gold CNR gives you discounts off the pay applications that are in the CNR like Think Free Office (how can you put the word ‘free’ in a pay product?) and Win4Lin. Would I have ever paid that kind of money for a GNU/Linux distro? Not a chance in hell. No way. Nada. Never. Therefore, I’m not going to recommend that you buy it. I will say, however, that if you ever have the chance to get your hands on a free Linspire CD you should do so.

There you have it. There’s my dark secret.

I tried Linspire and I like it.