Lindows 4.0 (2003)
baturin.org
baturin.org
Looking back, I realize now I’d been a self-denying computer geek before then but for whatever reason Lindows, it’s wacky installer, dual boot support, and fortunate hardware compatibility gave me the right nudge at the right time to send me on a lifetime of hacking.
Almost 25 years later, most as a professional software engineer, I have a completely biased affection for this strange OS.
Thanks for sharing!
Didn't make it but it taught me the terminal and some foundational concepts in an OS. Set me down the path of linux (ubuntu - bit easier to install) and hacking.
Decided, hey, might was well time it, for fun.
I came back 2 days later, it had just finished. The compilation took almost 2 full days :-)
fond memories prior to having a wife.
There was another way to install Gentoo?
It was Slackware that pioneered the loadlin boot loader installed on a dos partition that I think li does/linspire picked-up. This was all gradually killed off by ntfs and windows 2k
It was a magical time for Linux with konqueror as a viable desktop browser and galeon as the best browser available until IBM started sponsoring the project to make it like epiphany. Eventually konqueror was absorbed into WebKit for safari, proprietary flash made browsing on Linux unnecessary difficult (gnash came later), and Microsoft lawsuits were customary towards all friendly UX not on a Mac.
Nowadays Kodi/XBMC it's the spiritual sucessor.
Drawing in apps such as Inkscape and Arita.
Working up 3D models using OpenSCAD Graph Editor.
Taking notes w/ a pen in class using Write by Stylus Labs or Journal.
Edit: The site is still alive! http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
On the other side of the dot-com bust there were a lot of hard things that the team achieved even if the adoption never hit.
For example, a $199 PC sold at Walmart was notable for the time. It offered a working desktop with a full productivity suite from first boot. Without opening terminal, updating a repo, dealing with sound card or video card driver issues, etc.
There were so many edge cases on Windows and Linux at the time that Linspire sailed right past with nary an issue.
It felt like there was a small "window" of opportunity where a competitor to MS might have been able to gain some traction. On those low end computers the "Windows tax" could amount to a large percentage of the overall cost.
Sadly I think Lindows was just a little too late to the table. People were already used to the proprietary software they had, and OpenOffice was new and junky - a tough sell for people used to the MS suite. IE was also dominant, and the browser situation on Linux was a real problem due to ActiveX and other IE-only things that kept kicking around for years.
I also think the "Lindows" name did it no favors with those of us who already ran Linux. I remember reading about it on slashdot, but I mostly discounted it for my own use because of the branding.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Robertson_(businessman... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
I believe the paperwork indicated the music had been played publicly in like France or something. This some 20 years ago and all I have are memories, I was young and more eager to get my cash than anything else. What a wonderful time it was to be online back then.
There still isn't anything like what mp3.com used to be for discovering independent musicians. It is an absolute shame that such an amazing resource was destroyed for the sake of a futile protest.
They did happily sell CDs though, which I bought a few of. Quite a few bands used MP3.com to promote their live shows as well.
Entire genres of music thrived on MP3.com, and when the site went away, so did some of those genres, similar to how Soundcloud created entire new genres of music through community and discoverability.
A little history:
Robertson was an IT intern at SDSC a few years before I got there. One of the nice things about working there was that there was a cabinet in the datacenter that staff were allowed to use to house personal servers. Hardware you brought from home, old Sparcstations you took off the surplus pile in the basement...if you had some idea that needed a system, you could put it there.
By filling out a one-page form, you could get an IP on the 192.31.21.0/24 net (which was space we got from USAF, iirc...) and permission to host whatever you wanted on your old machine in the cabinet in the back row. Obviously, you were required to swear not to do anything illegal or annoying with your root access.
When I setup my first machine there, the long cat5 cable I used to plug into the switch still had "mp3.com" on the label.
And even with app stores neither Windows nor macOS come close to the seamless experience of updating all software from a single place.
Apple had, for some time, OS updates in the App Store, but not anymore. The software update in the preferences app is a step backward in that sense - why have two ways of doing everything?
And Windows is even worse. I have at least 6 apps I need to open if I want the Windows machine to update everything.
Sadly, my evil cousin upgraded her PC with Windows and I no longer know when she needs to update or clean up the disk.
meta note: the article is actually not from 2003, but is from 2018. The title itself is "Lindows 4.0 (2003)", not sure if adding a (2018) to the end would confuse things.
One for leisure, another one for serious stuff.
It's not just about whether doing the secure thing is difficult, it's whether doing the other things needed to defend against that risk is difficult - if you don't do those too, then it's still worthless and you're merely inconveniencing yourself for no reason because any attacks would use the methods of the first paragraph to work around your use of multiple accounts.
And the login manager it's usually XenoDM (forked XDM), GDM or whatever X.org based DE manager the user got installed, and that's impossible to tamper with with user permissions.
On potential malware, well, first you need to run it, and yes, any software could dump keyboard and mouse input under your account by design, but for sysadmins, XTerm has a secure keyboard input mode where the keyboard and mouse are bound to that XTerm window and you can't do anything else except to type in that XTerm, because the input it's locked to that window. Nothing can't sniff from that terminal emulator window, the channel is locked.
The only thing you could do it's to switch to VT with Ctrl-Alt-[F1-F7], but forget doing anything in the window manager. You can input to the XTerm and select info with the mouse and no more.
https://www.linspirelinux.com/2023/03/linspire-12-released.h...
Gnome seems to be catering more towards a 'hybrid' approach, easier to use with touch, laptops, simple out of box. The touchpad gestures are phenomenal and usability with portable/touch devices is really good. Wayland integration and scaling is miles ahead of KDE at the moment.
KDE is catering towards customization and traditional desktop use. There's more out-of-box features and using it on traditional desktop with keyboard and mouse make it really stand out. Their workspaces and KDE connect features are incredible.
I did not like KDE3 as much bc they removed these features and ended up with GNOME2, and eventually MATE.
One elderly secretary used it with zero issues for a few years, so I guess it was a success.
I tried to install it out of nostalgia on a VM to compare what we could do with it with very little mhz and MB of memory with what we have now but it started at such a low resolution that I couldn't run the installer and I didn't have the patience to try some kernel command line arguments to force a resolution.
As a Xandros employee I visited the Linspire office in San Diego, Ca;ifornia: it was a small industrial condo where the front half was an opulent personal office for Michael Robertson and the back half basically a closet where the other 4 to 6 employees worked.
Fun fact: Installing Linux on spare machines (we had plenty, one was used as doorstop, no kidding) was our idea. Our PM at the time, which was very likely the most ignorant one I ever had to interact with, didn't veto the initiative, still criticized it anyway because "Linux is amateurish, you should use something more professional". Long story short, after most part of the group, including myself, left because of that idiot, he was finally fired, and according to a colleague who kept working there, after a couple years they started moving everything to Linux.
And then after it was renamed Linspire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIYtKHnU4mQ
Loved it. Brilliant
Not so - you can see these at the Internet Archive, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20020624035714/http://www.lindow...
I remember my brother-in-law introducing me to Linux via Knoppix around that time, though.
Well, that hasn't changed, but people have convinced themselves that Linux on the desktop is 100% fine, and if you don't like it, the problem is you.
I bet a lot of these people would be served just fine by a Chromebook or iOS-like experience.
In any case, a flagship Chromebook running Crostini is hardly any different from GNU/Linux laptop, other than the fact that GNU/Linux is running on its own container.
Surprisingly enough, everything just worked on the laptop.
As much as Linus tries to keep a stable platform, the effort is pretty pointless (for desktop) if the rest of the ecosystem decides to change everything every few years.
Funny how that just keeps happening, isn't it?
Which is to be expected given that it's free and people do what is fun to them (and greenfield is always more fun) and all that, but it's still a shame.
> It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?
> But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
The article is 20 years old, it can vote now (and drink, in most places).
> An application mostly receives the SIGSEGV signal due to a bug in the application. The application was asked to save its documents.
Were Lindows applications really trying to handle SIGSEGV in this way?
In any event, I ended up trying it out and although I didn't like all the decisions, it was the first Linux distro that not only worked with WiFi out of the box (or with very little effort) and it had proprietary media codecs installed too so I could play my music and videos. I also remember the promise of the Click-N-Run technology, though I was happy enough with Apt.
I don't remember the reason now, but I got frustrated with something about Linspire and then went to Fedora Core -- or I tried to, but it didn't work with my WiFi card -- before stumbling upon this brand new distro with this weird African name called Ubuntu. Ubuntu had everything Linspire had in terms of out of the box flourishes (or was close enough to get that stuff working) but didn't have the negative reputation amongst the Linux nerds or a CEO who seemed hellbent on doing everything he could to antagonize everyone. Even better, it had spins for both a KDE and a Gnome version and the founder was some rich guy who would even send people a ton of CDs if they wanted them, for free. (I think I still have some of those CDs in my parents house somewhere from 2004 or 2005). As a 19 year old, that was pretty clutch for me and it became my secondary OS after Windows XP.
As a college student, I'll always remember Lindows/Linspire for the amount of drama it kicked up in the OSS spaces (and with Microsoft over the name) but more importantly, being the distro that for whatever reason led me to discover Ubuntu in its first few months of existence.
It's funny to think back now on just how hated it was amongst the Linux community -- which is sort of a shame. Like yes, Michael Robertson was always incredibly sketchy seeming and he absolutely had no time for the OSS nerds (it was clearly about profit for him, not ideology), but at the same time, Lindows/Linspire was one of the first Linux distros that out of the box could be something a normal computer user would actually be comfortable setting up and that was trying very hard at user-first decisions.
I've never shied away from doing things the "harder" or "more technical" way, but there were decisions made in Linux distros at that time that really made you really have to go out of your way to get things done and that then tried to shame you for wanting something like a working WiFi driver for your 802.11g card (because going back down to 802.11b was not great), regardless of the binary blob nature, or jump through way too many hoops to get codecs installed that would play your movies and videos. Lindows/Linspire had an elegance about it that I hadn't seen in a Linux distro before. And although Ubuntu briefly won my heart (before I gave it over to my truest of true loves, Mac OS X), I'll always fondly remember Linspire, if only for being audacious enough to actually make a Linux distro that wasn't designed for enthusiasts.
Or elementary for the mac users.
Probably true. But largely irrelevant.
> the cathedral can make a much better GUI than the bazaar.
Can is such an open ended claim it's impossible to judge (there's always another tomorrow). But does? Not so sure. I've used the big 3 extensively. I don't buy into the dafter reaches of Linux advocacy ("your great-grandmother could install it & have no problems & it's way easier than ...). But OTOH the annoyances I get from running Fedora as my main machine are at least no greater than I've had with Windows and MacOS. I prefer it because its balance of positives and negatives suit my preferences best; but I don't find any of the 3 main desktop OS's categorically superior. Admittedly that's because they're all pretty dismal. Every unhappy OS is unhappy in its own way. And every desktop OS is unhappy.
To each their own.
Edit: Had my dates wrong at first, in case you caught it for that minute.
The barrier will always be pre-installed OS. Needing to fiddle in the BIOS before you can install is a bridge too far.
For some, I'm sure this true but it's never quite worked for me. It's opinionated, which is fine but that means it isn't going to work for everybody.
Historically configurability of major OSes/DEs has almost always been:
1. KDE
2. Gnome 2
3. Windows
4. Gnome >2
5. MacOS
Simple, fast, lots of functionality. Reminds me of all the best parts of Windows XP and the focus is on tasks/programs and not full-screen apps like modern Gnome.
And almost as lightweight as FVWM (not quite, but closer than most mainstream DEs).
Some 10 years ago, maybe. Hiding scrollbars, making them small, gray on gray - that is not QA and UX.
Er. Given Windows 8-11, the cathedral can also do so much worse. I'm not sure that's meaningful.
My employer only allows Windows for PCs and iOS for phones.
If i buy i smartphone at a resonable price there is only Android. (no i will not pay 500 Euros for a thing that costs 50 Euros).
Almost none, instead Windows gets kind of emulated via Proton, thus making irrelevant any business reasons to target GNU/Linux directly.
With exception of NeXTSTEP, Irix, NeWS, UNIX is only good at headless workloads anyway, even POSIX doesn't cover GUIs.
Major desktop environment UIs are just as fine, if not better. They're just unfamiliar.
In themselves, each desktop is OK, the problem is that the UI experience is fragmented across several different toolkits (i.e. gtk, qt, etc) so it doesn't look consistent.
Windows and Mac do not have this problem.
The other problem is that a client-server architecture is inefficient for a locally rendered UI.
OTOH, when you buy a new laptop from a budget vendor or with slightly obscure HW, you have to wait 6month - 1year for all drivers to work well.
> the problem is that the UI experience is fragmented across several different toolkits
On windows also, most applications use their custom UI.
> client-server architecture is inefficient for a locally rendered UI.
Never a problem in practice. KDE is much faster and lighter than Windows 10.