I don't just remember, I ordered the desktop!
Linspire's attempt at low-cost did Linux a lot of harm. The desktop was under-powered, their software manager lacked too many apps and... it still suffered from dependency hell - leading to breakage.
While it looked nice, the polish wasn't there. Eventually, I found Mepis and everything just worked but I didn't have enough knowledge & (especially) time to stick with it. It was years before I attempted to go full-time Linux again. I still did lots and lots of distro-hopping though
I'm happy to report that I've been a full-time Linux user the last three years (Mint, for the curious). The entire landscape has changed enough that I have even effortlessly transitioned three users. Most users aren't heavy downloaders like me, so once they have their core apps, they're happy. It literally is click-n-play as far as usage now with the benefit of tremendous built-in hardware support when doing installs.