To all,

Downloaded Linspire 4.5, installed it and thought that I should share my experiences.

Some personal history:
Installed my very first Linux version in 1993, simply because there was a distro available (can't remember the name) which had Modula-2 on it, a campus license was about 20 euro's at that moment.
It took me 3 days to get it working, used it while I was working on my Modula 2 assignment and directly removed it afterwards 8-/

Installed Slackware, Windows, SuSE, Mandrake, Dual boot SuSE/Windows and Mandrake again. Currently I am using Mandrake 10.0 and am very pleased with it. I do have an old machine however, a nice machine to try out Linspire.

Linspire:
Wow, this is a clean and neat installation. I must say that Mandrake does a good job as well, but during the Linspire installation, no questions were asked and I ended up with a running system!

The desktop is clean although the konsole is very far away. I also do not like the transparent menus that are enabled by default..... But then again: are there linux users who are satisfied with a default installation, no matter what distro?

ADSL connection worked out-of-the-box, I do not think that I ever installed an operating system and was connected to the Internet that fast!

CNR looks very promising and if I wasn't using Mandrake, I guess I would be tempted to subscribe to CNR. After all... they supported a lot of open source projects financially, it doesn't hurt to pay that 5 dollars a month to help Linspire to help others, does it?

By the way: Tried to update my system with apt-get and messed up my kde installation, the default WM.... Well.... Linspire gives a warning so I guess I could have expected this.

Conclusion:
This is the FIRST distro I have seen that may be able to convince some friends (Microsoft geeks) that Linux can offer the same functionality (or more?) at a better price and with the same technical knowledge (read: hardly any) of the user as Microsoft.
I personally do not care too much about people thinking Linspire is not Linux and I do not want to discuss the subscription policy of CNR either. I think that Linspire offers a choice. A choice for non-linux users to take the step towards Linux without too much having to worry. A good choice.

Barry