It seems that this forum is populated mostly by people who love delving into their programs and tweaking them using obscure commands. I would like to know, from the people who post negatively about linspire: do you hate it because it isn't tweak friendly? or does it have real flaws that a clueless user like myself would regret if purchased?

How is linspire "not tweak friendly?"

Being Linux with X, you can do whatever the heck you want on Linspire. Want to run KDE/kwin? Go for it. Want to run the Gnome desktop? Do it. FVWM? Enlightenment? Just as with any other Linux distribution, you can change whatever you want.

Linspire attempts to create a unanimous unified sleek distribution. So, its full of restrictive default-practices and so on. It hasn't been developed with the tweaker in mind but the average user who wants consistency.

So, it is almost as tweakable as any distribution but you wont get any encouragement from the official side nor documents. I myself didn't have a problem with its tweakability for the short while that I was testing it out. Instead I had to leave it be due to extreme sickening caused by them rebranding software for their own needs.. (Linspire Interner Suite == firefox ~+ mozilla, Linspire Mail ~= Thunderbird and so on)

So, if Linspire interests you, go for it. Im sure its as good a distribution as any.. But if tweakability is what you truly want, then something more generic might be a better solution. So, perhaps try something free first, like OpenSuSE, and if its not making the cut for you, then pay for Linspire.. (although the SuSEway(tm) sometimes gets in the way of tweaking also (: )

I will dare say that I suspect that some of the most anti-Linspire posts are made by people who have never used it. So I think your question to "Linspire haters" about how it really performs is going to miss the mark.
Linspire occasionally offers "free coupons" (check the LQ Linspire forum) to download the install CD. I downloaded and installed it. I found that Linspire was a working Linux operating system.
Linspire installs a small set of default software. That means the install is fairly quick with minimal questions asked of the user. To add additional Linspire packages one must subscribe to CNR. CNR has a good amount of software that is available at no additional charge (after your CNR subscription), and some commercial software that costs extra money.
Personally I prefer the choices offered with most other distributions at install. I do not find CNR to be clear and above easier than any other package manager. I think distributions like Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, and Suse have a lot more packages to offer.
It sounds like you have not used Linux and are considering using Linspire. I would recommend Suse or Mandriva (in that order) rather than Linspire. Actually I would recommend that you try the Knoppix live CD/DVD first, which you can either download free or purchase cheaply (and not have to download it) from various places. But Linspire is far from unuseable. Whether you will regret the differences in Linspire depends on your requirements.
Maybe check out Knoppix and keep your eye out for a "free coupon".

I was looking for something that would run applications originally designed for windows, so something like the knoppix live cd, while fun to play with, just isn't quite what i'm looking for. I don't really have the time or an interest in learning to tweak linux. Just looking for a windows alternative, because I'm sick to death of paying for the same software multiple times. I have many gigs of data in forms only windows can read, and instead of running all my wma files thru a batch converter (which has produced mixed results, I would have to listen to all the converted files to make sure they weren't messed up) and changing all my works documents to rtf or some other format that other word processors can read, plus half a gazillion other things that I won't know about until I change my os, I would much rather find an os that comes with software ready to use that can read this stuff. which is why I am wondering, will linspire do it for me? thanks for your replies

Well, Linspire is coupled with Cedega so that will get you some windows programs running. But if you truly need a lot of windows apps on Linux, then I suggest you check out Crossover Office.

Now, I dont know what kind of data you have, but probably most of it can truly be used under Linux or easily converted into a more universal format. rtf isn't probably the best option but something like odt and the rest of the OpenDocument league might be the best alternative. As for music.. If you have DRMd wma:s, forget about them on linux. If they are non DRMed then its a piece of cake. There are multiple batchconverters around and all ive seen do a great job on the music data itself. The problem is the metadata (i.e. id tags).. Sofar the converts that ive seen loose all tags, so there indeed is a manual stage if you want them perfect. But hey, you shouldn't have been using wma in the first place so it was to be expected.. (:

IF you truly wan't to jump ship, then you have to understand that its a wholly different world. And that means change. So, be ready for the little problems with a clear attitude.. (: There is little chance that everything will go fine, you probably cannot get every windows app you need running.. Miracles arn't a part of computers so no need to be expecting them, the gap between Win-Lin is easy to cross but very different from the other side, but easily learned.
</ramblings>

That's not correct.
Linspire offers Cedega through it's CNR warehouse (but you'll need to buy it) Cedega is NOT included with Linspire by default.

Also as you probably know Cedega (formerly known as WineX) is a tool to play a limited number of Windows games on a Linux system and Crossover Office (CXOffice) is a tool to run certain Windows "productivity" programs and some plugins on Linux (offcourse both are based on the free WINE project).

[/QUOTE]

And to reply to the original posters comment that Linspire is not tweak friendly I guess I have to agree. Linspire is basically a heavily tweaked Debian GNU/Linux (last version was based on unstable Sarge I think, so it was a snapshot from before Sarge became stable). and the goal of Linspire is to make a very userfriendly Linux-based OS.
since their target market is not the basic Linux geek but the windows users who are not satisfied with the M$ products and want someting better that just works and the people who have zero or almost no computer experience. Therefor they decided to "hide" most advanced tools for the tweakers.

The Linspire point-of-view is that there is no reason for the user to have to see a CLI ever).

IMHO their decision not to include (or to hide) the more advanced parts on Linux is a bad one (IMHO people will evolve and want to learn more about their OS and Linspire is not realy made for that).

it is Linux for the people that use windows

Yes, that's basically what they are trying to do.
Allthough one can argue that Windows has no "Power-Users".

That's why I like it. I played with RedHat6.0 back in the late 20th century, but not as a substitute for Win98.
When Lin(dows)spire came along, though, M$ was banished from my home-made cheapbox forever.

I also played with RedHat and Debian before I found Lindows (Debian 2.0 or 2.2 I don't remember it was so long ago). and to be honnest allthough Linspire is a lot easier then most distro's (specialy compaired to Debian 2.2 and 3.0) but most other distro's have had a lot of progress over the years.
I'm not a RedHat fan from the beginning (I just like Debian better) but it has gotten a lot easier the last few years (some people might say that's because of Lindows/Linspire but there were others aswell even before Linspire (Makdrake comes to mind) who were trying to make life of the Linux user a bit easier.

I've been fairly pleased with Linspire, although I intend to put together another cheapbox with which to experiment with some other Linux distros [Xandros and Ubuntu, especially] — but I've spent so much time & money on my wife's Winbox that there's none left over for me...

I don't know about some people but linspire was clean and simple. It just looked to me that they try to make money by using their proprietary tools rather than letting people use apt-get.

not my fave, but not bad.

Well since Linspire is a company (Linspire Inc.) they need money to survive (I don't know how it's at the moment, but they didn't make any prefits in the first years after the launch of Lindows Inc. and the Microsoft lawsuite didn't help eighter).

Linspire needs CNR members to make money (they mostly sell Linspire with OEMs so they don't make much money from that since the OEM version is not that expensive).

They first thought of making CNR as a "universal" installer for Linux but they found it was almost impossible to make it work on "all" distro's so they dicided they needed a platform they controled themself, this is why they created LindowsOS/Linspire.

now that they control the platform (Linspire) they can make sure CNR works almost flawless on it. So it would be against their business to support other installation methods other then CNR.

It's not that they make sure APT doens't work on Linspire, it's more like they don't make an efford of making sure APT works on Linspire.

But on a positive note, both the CEO and President of Linspire respect the opinons of the Linux community and they (and the Linspire community) don't have the attitude you see with some eletist distro's. So they don't say "Our distro is the best, and all others are bad". They just say "Linspire is A Choice, but it's not the Only choice. And you use whatever distro or OS you feel comforable with"

Also, the "target audience" of Linspire (the true Windows n00bs) don't care about installing with APT, Sourcecode, DPKG, ... since they only know Windows and with windows it's download an .EXE and run it to install. Linspire's CNR males it even more easy then that.

I personally prefer to use APT but CNR is a perfect tool for these Windows converts.

I tried it briefly, but don't really know a lot about it, just a quick test drive for a lark. I prefer slackkware and debian. But I have no problem with what they're doing, with one caveat I'll get to in a minute.

They're trying to make a simple, easy to use distro that allows windows users in with the least pain and learning required. That's fine. BUT IIRC it sets up the user to run everything as root. The idea being that these windows converts don't want to have to mess around with sudo and the like. Well, I'm sure they don't, but that's still a step too far.

The correct way to handle this would be the way apple is doing it, I think. Simply running everything as root... insane. My apologies if they've fixed this since I saw it, and like I said, aside from that one thing, I've no problem with them.