> Anyone else here remember LindowsOS...

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.

I worked at Lindows/Linspire so below is obviously biased.

> The desktop was under-powered

It was the first sub $200 PC, what did you expect? The PC actually sold very well.

> their software manager lacked too many apps and... it still suffered from dependency hell - leading to breakage.

It was Debian under the hood and later Ubuntu and had every package in respective apt repo. It made available every major GUI based desktop app at the time via a graphical installer as the target user had no clue what CLI was nor “apt-get”. This turned a lot of existing Linux users off but they (you) were never the target market.

Linspire also made huge strides in specifically addressing dependencies including developing a package manager called Opium (https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~lerner/papers/opium.pdf). A number of these features went on to be folded directly into apt itself.

> Linspire's attempt at low-cost did Linux a lot of harm.

To the target market/user Linspire did far more good than harm. To the community, Linspire/Lindows gave back a ton. This included:

  - Financial supporter to Wine
  - Financial supporter to ResierFS (far ahead of any filesystem at the time… horrible tragedy what happened with his wife Nina)
  - Financial supporter to Debian (RIP Ian)
  - Financial supporter to Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird (ex. inline spell checking was first found in Linspire)
  - Funded gaps in applications such as NVU HTML editor
  - First sub $200 PC in retail store 
  - First commercial “app store” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNR_(software))
  - Was sued for Microsoft for trademark infringement and walked away with $20 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com,_Inc.)
  - Fastest Linux installer at the time by wide margin
  - Early adopter of Haskell 
  - First distro to use Bittorrent for distribution
  - Funded Desktop Linux Summit
  - Funded initiative to translate major apps into 50+ languages

All told Linspire put millions per year back into the community. One can argue business model to death but over 10 years of hindsight now show that consumers simply had no appetite for commercial desktop Linux (nor do they still).

Where Linspire really fell on its face was running as root. There could have been much more elegant solutions to solve this but decision was solely outside of engineering.

IMHO, there is a market for desktop linux. My wife and my (old) mother have linux (ubuntu gnome). I provide the (remote) support. I think one of the problems of desktop linux is that it tries to much to mimic windows with its limitatiions. As an old linux user, I want network transparency. In particular, I want to be able to wake my PC from my phone, to connect to it to browse and download files, then to shut it down. Graphical remote access (like vnc) would be appreciated.

There are many, many remote desktop solutions for Windows, and they even solve the NAT piercing problem for you. How often do you use X network sessions over the internet (i.e., not on a LAN)? 15 years ago I used remote X via LAN quite a lot, but getting it to work over the internet was always a royal PITA, to the point where I stopped bothering. VNC-like approaches for Windows (CoPilot and similar) pretty much always work on the first try (well they did 5-ish years ago when I last used them - can't say for sure right now).

There are Wake On LAN Android apps, and I presume IOS too. There are many mobile torrent clients, and shell emulators. Those who can work with a CLI can set up their desktop/server/mobile integration on Windows just as easily as on Linux. Look, it's true that for some things Linux (rather, 'a Unixy OS') is easier, but that doesn't mean there's a market for desktop Linux. Those who are hardcore enough to want it, don't want to pay for it; and those who want to pay have plenty of solutions on Windows.

Screenshot of the LindowsOS desktop on Wal-Mart website: https://imgur.com/3VsE0zL

Forum thread with information on the system details / costs of LindowsOS desktops at Wal-Mart: https://www.dbstalk.com/community/index.php?threads/wal-mart... (June 2002)

I think that I've got full CD sets for Mandrake and Red Hat 7 or so around somewhere. Or maybe partial for Mandrake, and full for Red Hat? I'd have to look around and see what I've kept, over the years. It should certainly be more than the 1-2 disks that most of those earlier distros have on that page, but only maybe 1 or 2 releases.

Found 3 disks of Mandrake 8.1, one disk of Mandrake 9.0, and one of Slackware 11.

I know that I've got a few of Red Hat 8, and at least one of 9, because I had the book "Red Hat Linux 8 for Dummies", and downloaded the extra disks from Red Hat themselves afterwards. I think that book's in my (sleeping) son's room, along with some other mid-2000s Linux disks.

I bought a Dell linux laptop in 2008 with Ubuntu that I used as a primary machine for a few years. This was a few years later of course, but linux machines were definitly "doable" back then. I still have it. It runs xubuntu (14.04) well.

It would probably run Xubuntu 16.04 just as well too :) My Dell desktop form the same year does.

Lubuntu is even lighter.

I have modern hardware but still use Lubuntu.