Opinions on Freespire and other distros?

[UniverseA7X]

What are yours? I recently looked up freespire because Lindows was the original OS on one of our old PC's. My question to you is, what is your opinion on Linspire and Freespire?

I feel like checking out other distro's for my macbook as of late. I want to try openSUSE 11 when it does come out, and freespire also caught my eye as well. Are there any others you would reccomend?

Whether it is KDE or Gnome doesn't really matter, I like both. :KS

Thanks!:guitar:

[jrusso2]

Freespire is outdated now its based on Feisty Fawn.

I would go with Linux Mint if you want something modern with all the codecs and stuff built in.

[UniverseA7X]

Alright. I'll likely be testing all these out in Parallels before I install one of them.

How about opinions on openSUSE? Aside from the MS deal, Do you like the distro?

[LaRoza]

How about opinions on openSUSE? Aside from the MS deal, Do you like the distro?
OpenSUSE is very easy to use. It is the distro I would think a new user could install and use with minimal support.

OpenSUSE frusterates Linux users for being slow, but that is what you get when you get a distro meant to be used out of the box.

[izanbardprince]

Freespire/Linspire=Yuck. Where do I even begin? First the thing was oversold as being like a sort of cheap Windows, and then the guy went even further, calling it "Lindows" and claiming they had this crack team of rocket scientists designing it to be a fully Windows compatible Linux, then the guy even got an unexpected bonus....Microsoft sues him for calling it Lindows, and their case is questionable, so Lindows gets a truckload of money and changes their name to Linspire.

If all that wasn't bad enough, they pee all over the idea of trying to at least minimize your dependence on proprietary software, and insted, they pump the damned thing full of it, taking this further they introduce yet ANOTHER way to install software, which is really just a new frontend for apt, which lets them turn package installation into a way to BUY software from them, proprietary software for which there is free/libre alternatives, which they conveniently omitted.

Taking it further yet, they got to Mark Shuttleworth and almost succeeded in convincing Canonical to infect Ubuntu with their filth, which had that happened, I would have packed up and found another distribution.

Also, yes OpenSuse is quite a nice/polished distro, but you need to remove xine-lib (they crippled it) and install libxine1 and libdvdcss2 from Packman's repositories to get good multimedia support.

OpenSuse or Debian are my two backup choices should anything even happen to, or corrupt Ubuntu (hope that's a choice I don't ever have to make though).

Edit: Here's an article about "Free"spire worth reading, http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060424164142296

I should note that there is no longer any "open source edition", they killed that off in Freespire 2.0, or as I like to call it "Knifebuntu", as in a big freaking knife in the back of everything free software stands for, they aren't apologetic about using proprietary crap, they say that selling you down the river to these closed source proprietary jerks is a "feature".

Thats right, and don't use libdvdcss to play your DVD's for free, you should spend $30 on LinDVD, yeah right, sure....

[Midwest-Linux]

Freespire gets high marks from me because it does audio and video out of the box, it has licensed proprietary codecs, it is very easy to install, it can run on 256MB Ram though 512 is better. And it is free.

The bad thing is like others have said, it is based on 7.04 and seems to be stuck there and I have seen no announcements whatsoever of a new version.

Linspire costs $49, I haven't used it. Freespire is the free version of Linspire.


Open Suse 10.3 could not get on the internet, could not access the network card or didn't have the proper drivers. I dropped it like a hot potato.

Open Suse 11 RC found the internet with no problem, I just installed it and haven't found time to really check it out yet.

PCLOS Gnome2008, One of the best desktops I have ever seen, easy to use and nearly impossible to install.

Knoppix 5.3, one of the best distros out there, everything worked great out of the box. Trying to install it, well thats a whole different story. Damn shame too, this had a lot of potential.

Linux Mint, probably the best out there. Based on Ubuntu and tweaked and polished. Highly recommended.

Ubuntu, excellent...but prefer Linux Mint slightly more.

Xubuntu, highly under rated. The best Linux operating system for older and slower Pentium II computers . If all you have is a Pentium II with 160 to 256 MB Ram...this operating system is for you. Easy to install and use the alternate text based installer instead. This will scream on a modern computer!

DSL (Damn Small Linux) I think its the best minimum distro out there that will still allow you to get on the internet and do some modern apps especially with Pentium I (or less) computers.
No luck with trying to install it.

[Hallvor]

PCLOS Gnome2008, One of the best desktops I have ever seen, easy to use and nearly impossible to install.

Nearly impossible to install? I didn`t think it was any harder than installing Ubuntu, Mandriva or any other mainstream distro. But it is a very good Gnome desktop - at least when you change the Vista-ish theme.. :)

You get all the latest upgrades and software by a simple apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

PCLOS is in my opinion by far the easiest to use rolling release out there (and arguably the easiest beginner`s distro of all), and it doesn`t use that much RAM either. From a clean desktop it uses some 100 MB.

[MONODA]

linux mint is really great, I use it. I would also recommend opensuse. I have enjoyed past versions and think 11 will be great.

[C!oud]

I tried Freespire and I wasn't impressed at all I totally agree with izanbardprince about it. OpenSUSE wasn't too bad I dropped it after no matter what I did I couldn't get my internet to work and I didn't like yast either. I enjoyed using PCLOS on another computer but it just refused to recognize my graphics card and i couldn't get the right driver for it. Mandriva was way too buggy for me so I dropped that after a few days too. I've also used Linux Mint and I didn't really find anything too special with it. Yes on default it has a more polished look but other than that I didn't see any advantages of it over Ubuntu. Another good beginner one (or so I've heard) would be Mepis although I have never tried it before but you might want to look into it.

[linux6994]

I just switched all of my Linux PCs to Ubuntu. I was a Freespire user for several years. They just did not update their repositories and releases as quick a Ubuntu. When Hardy came out I jumped ship. Windows file sharing on in the KDE environment is effortless in Freespire as opposed to Kubuntu which I had tried after FS. Windows file sharing in Ubuntu with nautilus is a snap.

[izanbardprince]

I just switched all of my Linux PCs to Ubuntu. I was a Freespire user for several years. They just did not update their repositories and releases as quick a Ubuntu. When Hardy came out I jumped ship. Windows file sharing on in the KDE environment is effortless in Freespire as opposed to Kubuntu which I had tried after FS. Windows file sharing in Ubuntu with nautilus is a snap.

Probably because their "community" releases are really just a sock puppet distribution designed to make Kevin Carmony and the rest of Linspire look not so crooked.

[cardinals_fan]

Probably because their "community" releases are really just a sock puppet distribution designed to make Kevin Carmony and the rest of Linspire look not so crooked.
Kevin Carmony is no longer involved with Linspire. He resigned last year, and is currently using Ubuntu.

[izanbardprince]

Hmmmm, I must have been too busy laughing at them to notice they have a different talking head, spewing out the same line of BS.

Especially promoting Cedega as a feature, that one really killed me, I found that Wine and Cedega both mangle a lot of games, just in different ways, but Wine is free/libre and nobody ever told me it would play a list of "Triple A" games that it really can't run at all, Cedega is pure crap.

But it doesn't matter that it doesn't really work, it's marketable, and newbies probably figure thats all the more they're going to get out of running their Windows games on Linux.

[AgentZ86]

Hi,

I like them all.

Probably not what was expected, but I must say they all have their pros'and cons, but overall I like them all.

They are all saving me lots of money and time.

Well, at least I must admit that I've not used all of them, however almost all that are listed in the distrowatch.com and I like all the ones that I've used.

Some are harder then others, some have nicer features with less hardware support, and others have more hardware support with less features.

Either way I like paying for what I want, and not because I have to.

All about the software freedom for me.

The main thing for me is that I like the distos that have good and nice people in the communities.

There are a few that I've tried where the community really,really stinks with rude modorators, and rude people. I just don't use those distros, but the the distro itself was nice I must admit.

Good thing there are other places to go to get a distro and you don't have to deal with things that you don't like.

Thats the best part about linux in general.

I'm currently very fond of Ubuntu 7.10 and Ubuntu 8.04

Installs on older computers with no problems, and I sell to customers even on older P3 computers just for mainly an internet appliance / email/browser/documents work etc.

Well, thats all I know