joshya wrote
This LQ'er agrees with what joshya wrote here and above rgdng Linspire.
Happen to have a laptop which had Linspire pre-installed along with free CNR for a year.
Worked OK out-of-the-box.

Eventually decided to more optimally reconfigure the laptop for a more "pure" Debian-type system, so instead of Ubuntu or Mepis, went ahead and did the harddrive-install with Knoppix 3.7 wiping out the Linspire.
The killer app on Knoppix for me was QtParted, the open source partition manager similar to Partition Manager,
http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/
After further Debian tweaking (which this LQ user did not wish to go through with Linspire/CNR) laptop now functions even better than it did with Linspire!

Guess what. QtParted comes with Linspire. You don't even need to CNR it.

I don't even know why I'm getting into this, but I'm going to.
I am what most would consider new to the Linux world. I am extremely proficient at Windows and can't stand Microshort so I wanted to switch. I've tried different distros of Linux on and off, from Redhat to Debian to Gentoo and even the odd live cd like Knoppix to see what would happen on my computer.
Well somebody gave me a copy of Linspire 4.5. I had tried many times to get my wireless working on my laptop using ndiswrapper (gotta love broadcom) and to no avail in most distros I might add. It was the one major thing that was keeping me from switiching over completely. Finally, I put Linspire in on my blank partition, put in ndiswrapper and it worked!! I don't know whether I got smarter, ndiswrapper got better, or Linspire was just easier, but it worked. It even mounted my Windows drives so I can copy over the files I need! How cool is that?
Do I want to use Linspire forever? Of course not. I would like to move to Mandrake or Fedora Core 3 or maybe even Debian, but for now I can say I've had some success with Linux using the dreaded Linspire. It's probably the distro I'll end up crediting with my complete switch away from Microshort.
It seems hard core Linux users are command line junkies. They just love to tweak and play and say they "did it themselves". If I had the time to learn all the command line stuff and play for hours and hours on end, I probably would be a command line junkie too. God knows I love to play with computers!! But with a two year old, a full time teaching job, and a life I don't have time to spend 3 weeks setting up an operating system. I need something that will essentially work out of the box and let me play when I have the time. That way I know everything works, I can tinker at my leisure, and learn as I go, just like I did with Windows. (Mind you I got proficient in Windows long before I ever had a child and I did spend 18 hours a day on the computer!)
Is Linspire the distro of choice for experienced Linux users? Nope. Would anybody ever say it was? Of course not. Does it work for newbies, people who don't have time, or people who just don't care about the command line? You bet!! And if it gets a few more people away from Microshort then so be it. When you know better, you do better, or at least you try to.
I know most hard core linux users will usually recommend Mandrake or Fedora Core to a newbie, but those didn't work on my laptop and required too much fiddling. With Linspire, everything works, and I can still learn about RPM's and tar files, figure all that stuff out, then switch to a distro that gives me more room to play with that stuff when I feel comfortable doing so.
I mean think about it, in Windows, for example, we don't generally give a new computer user a computer with Windows on it and tell them to format the harddrive, we give them a fully functional computer to play with and learn from. Its only after much playing that one learns to format the harddrive (and some of us never learn). So why on earth would you give a newbie Linux user a distro for which the first thing they had to do was compile a kernel? Start off slow and work your way up. You'll get more users that way! Take it from a teacher. We don't teach calculus before we teach how to count and all the other basic math skills. So why would you format harddrives and compile kernels before you learn to cut and paste?
Anyway, I'll stop rambling now. I just wanted to voice my opinions. Linspire has a use in the Linux world. It is a Linux distro and should be left to do what its good at, converting Windows users, like me, to Linux!

Minnie000

I like Linspire because I can install a bunch of programs
"while being dead drunk" and still not hose my computer :P

CNR rocks!

http://madpenguin.org/cms/html/47/3717.html

Ya, that is a good review.
Very detailed and to the point.

Minnie000 thankyou for an honest comment. I don't think any "regular" person will ever stay with using one exclusive version of any operating system, either. I'm lazy, and an ex MS Windows user over many years, and PC-DOS before that. I agree about the command line points you made.

I'm too old and can't be bothered to keep trying new stuff indefinitely. But Linspire 5.0 will do me for now

Anyone that bashes Linspire is uneducated, or just stubborn. People bash Linspire because it makes Linux easy, beacause its to much like Xp, what about Ubuntu? almost everthing is point and click on Ubuntu why not bash them? Xandros, is almost like Linspire in everyway? I dont hear people complaining about them. The new Debian Sarge, is going for a easy installer, and with apt-get you can point and click and download software, are you going to bash Debian because its making it to easy?
Oh, but Linspire charges for software. So does Mandriva, Join Mandriva club and have access to thousands of Mandrake software packeges, says it right on the website, so why not bash them? And again Xandros does the very same. But your also getting support, and helping out different software programers, what People dont realise is Linspire supports many open source projects, so without some of the funding from Linspire, who knows, maybe some projects wouldnt be around.
So exactly what is the poblem here? So a lot of us dont want to be bothered by the commandline, or we'er not software developers and dont need Dev tools, or arent computer savy and want an easy install, its the 21st century people the computer should be working for me not the other way around.

Dirty_Ink I think you hit the nail on the head, hehe

This might not be the best thread to post this question and I'm sure you've heard it a million times but I'm fed up of looking through hundreads of incomprehensible linux sites. So, basicly which is the best linux package for someone who just wants a simple Windows-like OS? So far I've found Linspire (current front-runner), Xandros and Mandrake. I don't mind paying for the OS, I just want something that can install itself and be as easy to use as Windows. I tried Linspire Live! (great promotional idea) and everything seems to be running fine on my laptop. But I don't want to commit myself to Linspire only to find out later that I could get much more, with only a bit more effort, from something like Mandrake. I use my computer for basic stuff like web-browsing, word-proccessing, Photoshop, Torrents etc. but I'm very experienced with Windows and have it highly customized (as much as one can, of course) so I also kind of want something I can explore a bit. Any ideas?

it would be best if you made a new topic in the linux Distributions thread.

but out of those i would recommend Mandrake/Mandriva.

You can do everything you mentioned(and much more of course) in mandrake.

oh BTW, my first distro was Mandrake 7.2, and if it wasn't for a distro like mandrake, i wouldn't be using linux right now. I know that if i started out on something like xandros i would have thought, "Wow, linux is just a poor substitute trying to imitate windows, so why don't i just use the real thing?"

Hi, BallyK,

Like you I'm an experienced MS Windows user, and PC-DOS and OS/2 before that in my case.

You could try Sun Java Desktop (which is one you buy). They have a forum here on this site, too.

With SJDS you have the best of a couple of worlds here; there is a large number of CDs of optional programs that ship in the box, with a huge amount of documentation on CDs, and the backing of Sun Microsystems of course.

The product is based on SuSE, with the Gnome desktop, and you can download a live CD to try it out.

So there is also the availability of applications written for SuSE as well, and Gnome add-ons. I happen to like it.

As liquidtenmillion siad, there is a big range. One you didn't mention is Lycoris (was Redmond Linux) and Xandros of course started life as Corel Linux.

There are many distros out there but the ones we have mentioned in these few posts are all "good"... and perhaps using as many Live distros as possible is a good way to go to see what you like, and what you don't.

Another suggestion, when you do decide (which may not be your final decision either, because choice is a big part of the Linux scene), there are excellent links about how to migrate all you have from MS Windows to Linux. There is one on the IBM site that is a very good one. Give you the link if you are interested.

Enjoy the choice

bally, if you want a distro that just does what it is supposed to, then linspire will work. but if you are actually interested in learning how to use linux, then i would probably recommend a debian based distro like mepis/knoppix/kubuntu.

Thanks for all that info guys! Although I am more confused now than when I started. I guess I'll just jump in somewhere and I'm sure as soon as I get the feel of linux will start trying out different options. Two things concern me though: Installing new apps sounds complicated and likely to mess things up. How true is that? And secondly, I want something that will be able to use files from my XP partition, especially photos (I do a lot of retouching etc) and mp3s both of which are on NTFS partitions. Linspire help said it can read from an NTFS partition/drive but that one shouldn't try writing to it. Does this apply to all linux systems? How do I get around it?

p.s. sorry for taking this thread off on a tangent will start a new thread with more questions later, Cheers!

ps2 eagles-lair can I get that IBM link please, would be very useful, thanks!

BallyK
Hi,

I think it sounds complicated because it is different. There are several choices according to which sort of Linux... for examples a particular packaging method used originally by RedHat and then copied by some others is the rpm used also by Mandrake and SuSE... and the deb which Debian variants use for example Ubuntu/Kubuntu and I think Lycoris and xandros but not 100% certain.

As with MS Windows installation of apps, the associated files and libraries to make it run are packaged with the executable and this is sometimes a problem because instead of the bloatware concept of all applications using their own files, Linux being open source tends to share dependant files (or shared files) generally referred to generically as "dependencies". It is here we can come unstuck because of more recent issues of a library can break an existing working application, or prevent a new one from installing correctly.

I've encountered this on Unix and found it a considerable time waster and headache, which is (in all honesty) a major reason I decided to go with linspire as their CNR system generally speaking is very good with this aspect. Although I am having a problem, having discovered the Audacity sound editor (which is a real beauty) I find the LAME encoder library appears broken in Linspire both 5.0 and 4.5 - but the guys concerned are working on it for me (and others).

No Linux currently has a reliable way of writing to NTFS so if you need bi-directional access on a dual boot system, you should consider converting that drive from NTFS to FAT-32. The convertor in PartitionMagic is really good, and I have used it in various situations and to date have not had it break the file system that way. Although the adage "back up" really needs to be remembered when dealing with irreplaceable things like photos and music.

There is absolutely no difficulty in Linux reading from an NTFS partition. Meaning that if you want to work on them and then store them somewhere else, that's fine, cool, whatever

I'll look for it my morning (it's twenty to eleven at night in my corner of Australia right now

If you want ease of installing apps, then i recommend Ubuntu, which is debian based. You would really like that, however multimedia isn't good out of the box, yet you can install the necessary programs by clicking on Desktop>Install Software(or something like that) then you have a program that lets you search for/install any app that is in the repositories, then you just check what you want to install, and it will select all of the dependencies, download all the necessary packages, and then installs them. Automatically.