My Thoughts On Linspire

Linspire is a Linux distribution that tries to be the "world's easiest desktop Linux." It has been criticized heavily because it has extensive use in proprietary software. I don't see much wrong with proprietary software in general. In fact, I like proprietary software, but I also like open-source software. I simply like what software works for me. Now, I haven't tried Linspire, and I don't plan to. I don't have a major problem with Linspire, except for a few things.

For starters, it costs $50 US. That's a good deal when you compare to Windows Vista Home Basic, or even Mac OS X Leopard, but for a Linux distribution, you would still need to justify the cost. I don't see much that I can't get from, let's say, Ubuntu 7.10. Linspire 6.0 is even based on Ubuntu 7.04, the previous release.

Some Linux distributions have similar systems in place for when you need to install certain codecs or hardware drivers. For example, PCLinuxOS, at least when I had previously tried it, could play a ton of propritary formats, it even played Quicktime videos, something I couldn't figure out.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't like their Click 'N Run package managment system. I tried it on my Ubuntu installation a while back and it never worked. But maybe it works our for Linspire, but I like using the Debian and Ubuntu way of handling packages, either by apt-get or through a GUI tool like the Synaptic Package Manager. The RPM format from Red Hat is also something I do like.

With so many new distributions like PCLinuxOS, Linux Mint, and more established distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora stepping up on polish, and even since the community edition of Linspire is available, Freespire came out a while back, why buy Linspire?

What do you guys think about this?