There once was a time when desktop adoption was seen as the most important goal
for Linux. Since then, Linux has come to dominate the market of supercomputers,
web servers, mobile devices, network devices, and IoT, but most desktop computers
are still running Windows. While there are millions of Linux desktops, it’s still a minority.
Sure, Linux has succeeded, but not in a way people in the early 2000’s had anticipated.
A certain category of people thought the best way to gain desktop adoption was
to mimic Microsoft Windows as much as possible. Sometimes it took benign
forms, such as making Windows-like themes for window managers, but some took it
to the exreme.
And then there was Lindows… The distribution that failed to gain any popularity
with either Windows users or free software advocates. For Windows users, it was
not a drop-in replacement because not one OS in the world can be a drop-in replacement
for another. For free software advocates, it was a blatant disregard of free software
ideals because it mixed free and proprietary software arbitrarily.
Its name was an obvious lawsuit magnet, and it sure happened,
but the lawsuit was settled out of court and apparently got the project developers $20M, which didn’t seem to
help it much. It was since then renamed to Linspire/Freespire, sold to different companies multiple times,
and is now owned by PC/OpenSystems LLC. Freespire looks like yet enother Ubuntu derivative to me,
though I haven’t looked deep. Linspire costs at least $80 and I’m not $80 interested in it.
In any case, that distro has little if anything in common with the original Lindows, and should not be judged
by this review!
In this review we are going to take a look at the last release actually named “Lindows”,
version 4.0 from 2003.
I’ve heard of it at the time, but never tried it because I thought it was ridiculous. Let’s see if my
judgement was correct.
Installation images are available from WinWorldPC
(its team is doing a great work keeping old OSes available!). It boots in VirtualBox with standard Linux 2.4 setup just fine
(PIIX3 chipset, IDE drives, PCNet NIC). We are met with a custom graphical bootloader:
The installer loads and offers two options, to use the entire drive, or to setup partitions by hand.
Naturally, I picked the latter option, but the first surprise was lurking there:
That’s right, you can only pick a drive or a partition from a list.
There is no functionality for creating or editing partitions, unlike in most other distros from any era,
so the only way one could possibly install it alongside another OS would be to create partitions beforehand.
I didn’t check if it was capable of detecting Windows installations and setting up the bootloader accordingly.
Another surprise awaits at the next screen:
The hostname option is fine. The password though… which user’s password are we asked for?
The root password? Will we have an option to add a non-root user?
Uhm, no. The next screen just asks to confirm the settings.
All we can d
