
Wal-Mart Offers Linux as Windows Alternative (2003) - dannyrosen
http://rhizome.org/community/25205/
======
git-pull
Anyone else here remember LindowsOS (later changed its name to Linspire)?

In the early 2000's (around the time of the article), they were trying to get
point and click simplicity for installing software (which even back then was
abundant in Linux). I remember a few others distros, like Mandriva (Mandrake
at the time) had graphical package managers. There were others.

To anyone who's curious and feels like giving old Linux distros a try,
[https://old-linux.com/](https://old-linux.com/) is a good resource.
Unfortunately I can't find any mirrors of repos with packages that go back to
1998 and early 2000's.

~~~
xrqvt
> Anyone else here remember LindowsOS...

I don't just remember, I ordered the desktop!

Linspire's attempt at low-cost did Linux a lot of harm. The desktop was under-
powered, their software manager lacked too many apps and... it still suffered
from dependency hell - leading to breakage.

While it looked nice, the polish wasn't there. Eventually, I found Mepis and
everything just worked but I didn't have enough knowledge & (especially) time
to stick with it. It was years before I attempted to go full-time Linux again.
I still did lots and lots of distro-hopping though

I'm happy to report that I've been a full-time Linux user the last three years
(Mint, for the curious). The entire landscape has changed enough that I have
even effortlessly transitioned three users. Most users aren't heavy
downloaders like me, so once they have their core apps, they're happy. It
literally is click-n-play as far as usage now with the benefit of tremendous
built-in hardware support when doing installs.

~~~
knobbytires
I worked at Lindows/Linspire so below is obviously biased.

> The desktop was under-powered

It was the first sub $200 PC, what did you expect? The PC actually sold very
well.

> their software manager lacked too many apps and... it still suffered from
> dependency hell - leading to breakage.

It was Debian under the hood and later Ubuntu and had every package in
respective apt repo. It made available every major GUI based desktop app at
the time via a graphical installer as the target user had no clue what CLI was
nor “apt-get”. This turned a lot of existing Linux users off but they (you)
were never the target market.

Linspire also made huge strides in specifically addressing dependencies
including developing a package manager called Opium
([https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~lerner/papers/opium.pdf](https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~lerner/papers/opium.pdf)).
A number of these features went on to be folded directly into apt itself.

> Linspire's attempt at low-cost did Linux a lot of harm.

To the target market/user Linspire did far more good than harm. To the
community, Linspire/Lindows gave back a ton. This included:

    
    
      - Financial supporter to Wine
      - Financial supporter to ResierFS (far ahead of any filesystem at the time… horrible tragedy what happened with his wife Nina)
      - Financial supporter to Debian (RIP Ian)
      - Financial supporter to Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird (ex. inline spell checking was first found in Linspire)
      - Funded gaps in applications such as NVU HTML editor
      - First sub $200 PC in retail store 
      - First commercial “app store” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNR_(software))
      - Was sued for Microsoft for trademark infringement and walked away with $20 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com,_Inc.)
      - Fastest Linux installer at the time by wide margin
      - Early adopter of Haskell 
      - First distro to use Bittorrent for distribution
      - Funded Desktop Linux Summit
      - Funded initiative to translate major apps into 50+ languages
    

All told Linspire put millions per year back into the community. One can argue
business model to death but over 10 years of hindsight now show that consumers
simply had no appetite for commercial desktop Linux (nor do they still).

Where Linspire really fell on its face was running as root. There could have
been much more elegant solutions to solve this but decision was solely outside
of engineering.

~~~
reacweb
IMHO, there is a market for desktop linux. My wife and my (old) mother have
linux (ubuntu gnome). I provide the (remote) support. I think one of the
problems of desktop linux is that it tries to much to mimic windows with its
limitatiions. As an old linux user, I want network transparency. In
particular, I want to be able to wake my PC from my phone, to connect to it to
browse and download files, then to shut it down. Graphical remote access (like
vnc) would be appreciated.

~~~
roel_v
There are many, many remote desktop solutions for Windows, and they even solve
the NAT piercing problem for you. How often do you use X network sessions over
the internet (i.e., not on a LAN)? 15 years ago I used remote X via LAN quite
a lot, but getting it to work over the internet was always a royal PITA, to
the point where I stopped bothering. VNC-like approaches for Windows (CoPilot
and similar) pretty much always work on the first try (well they did 5-ish
years ago when I last used them - can't say for sure right now).

There are Wake On LAN Android apps, and I presume IOS too. There are many
mobile torrent clients, and shell emulators. Those who can work with a CLI can
set up their desktop/server/mobile integration on Windows just as easily as on
Linux. Look, it's true that for some things Linux (rather, 'a Unixy OS') is
easier, but that doesn't mean there's a market for desktop Linux. Those who
are hardcore enough to want it, don't want to pay for it; and those who want
to pay have plenty of solutions on Windows.

------
jordigh
Last week I was sitting in an undergraduate lecture hall with hundreds of
students. I looked back at their laptops and it was a sea of Apple logos.

We've traded one monopoly for another.

~~~
overcast
That's because MacOS is the Unix/Linux desktop done correctly. Gives both
power users, and my grandmother, what they want in that environment, with a
proper interface, and good software.

~~~
amelius
I think it's strange that there isn't any Linux distro yet that successfully
mimics the good parts of the UI of OSX.

~~~
pessimizer
I think the lack of imitation is because people don't actually like OSX UI,
other than people who are simply accustomed to it, or who like the idea or the
fashionable commodity luxury appeal of Apple products. If people actually
liked it for qualities divorced from brand or narrow experience, those of that
group who had deeply held FOSS beliefs would have had any number of widely
used workable imitations by now.

Apple UI is bad. The belief that it is good is largely religious and a result
of branding.

~~~
wtallis
Can you offer any specifics about what makes the OS X/macOS UI so bad? And is
there anything you think Apple's UI does better than most other platforms?

------
throwaway2016a
I've been looking to "upgrade" my OSX laptop to Linux and on a whole have been
disappointed by the hardware build quality on the Linux machines.

What I really want is a thin and light unibody aluminum frame and high density
screen on a Linux machine. But since I can't find that, OS X is a nice
substitute.

Edit: Thank you for the suggestions everyone.

~~~
batisteo
I've got an Asus UX305C for 1,5 years now, very nice machine.

~~~
Abundnce10
I'm assuming it didn't come with Linux installed. Which version of Linux are
you running? And do any features of the laptop not working with the Linux OS?

~~~
CoolGuySteve
I have one with ubuntu 16.04. The only thing that didn't work was the volume
up/down keys due to some weirdness in the Asus BIOS. I changed it to be shift
+ Fkeys instead of fn+FKeys in the keyboard settings.

Other than that, because the Intel chipset has pretty good open source
support, it's an excellent laptop.

------
thehardsphere
I'm guessing in the ensuing 14 years this offering did not continue. I
wouldn't know; I'm part of the generation that swore off buying software or
computers at Wal-Mart when they were selling Duke Nukem 3D with the parental
control option permanently turned on.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
It did continue. They're called Chromebooks now.

Granted it perverted the entire idea of Linux by limiting the user's freedom
to run anything but a data-harvesting web-browser, but, semantics.

~~~
Apocryphon
FreeBSD (as the other thread points out) brought us macOS and Linux brought us
Chrome OS. Do FOSS folks lament this dramatic irony a lot?

~~~
TallGuyShort
I will admit to passive-aggressively refusing to help people fix their Macs
and iPads, telling them that Apple makes a point of being closed and
proprietary, and that if they want free tech support from me they should ask
me for a software recommendation I'm willing and able to stand behind first.

But... I don't really care if my contributions to open-source get used in a
closed-source product. I just won't buy it because you intentionally neutered
my ability to fix it myself. And I'm going to raise that point if your
potential customers ask me what I think of it. But I don't feel any bitterness
over it that I don't also feel for stuff that's entirely proprietary to begin
with.

------
burntrelish1273
Wasn't this about the same price-point as eMachines (sans Linux)?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMachines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMachines)

------
aabajian
I bought SuSE Linux at Best Buy 15 years ago. This was before I had a fast-
enough internet connection to download it. I remember there were a few other
distros available as well.

------
MentallyRetired
15 years and Linux still has barely improved the usability for the average
user.

~~~
88e282102ae2e5b
I would argue that Xubuntu is almost grandparent-ready.

~~~
digi_owl
Frankly Linux is grandparent ready.

The problem i "power user" ready, in particular "media production power user"
ready.

But then that group is tribal, if not religious, that makes RMS seem atheist.

