Freespire 4.5 Released For Letting The Linspire/Lindows Legacy Live On

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Freespire 4.5 Released For Letting The Linspire/Lindows Legacy Live On

It was nearly a year ago to the day that PC/OpenSystems LLC announced they were resurrecting Linspire and Freespire from the dead. The company is celebrating that milestone for the OS previously known as "Lindows" by releasing Freespire 4.5...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Freespire-4.5-Released

[Danny3]

Using Chromium...
No thanks!
They could've at least put Ungoogled-Chromium instead of Chromium, if Chromium was chosen instead of Firefox for performance reasons.

[waxhead]

What's the point ? Microsoft will probably release something called Windux delirium edition NT for workgroup junkies XP 3.100 or something before we know it.

[andyprough]

Are they reviving the Lindows software store and selling free apps for $40 apiece again?

[Spooktra]

It's really a shame that there is no vision in the Linux community. We have a bunch of remasters of a handful of base distributions but no one tries to do anything truly unique with their offering.

[edwaleni]

It's really a shame that there is no vision in the Linux community. We have a bunch of remasters of a handful of base distributions but no one tries to do anything truly unique with their offering.

Selling free apps in Linux for $40 was pretty unique.

What would be unique now? The desktop for anything has run its course. There may be a some interesting stuff here and there, but as a general movement, its kind of over.

Information consumption has moved from the desktop to mobile.

[QuImUfu]

It's really a shame that there is no vision in the Linux community. We have a bunch of remasters of a handful of base distributions but no one tries to do anything truly unique with their offering.

There are numerous vastly different distros. The ones that come to my mind immediately are Tiny Core Linux (the most fascinating distro i have ever seen), Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, Nix OS, Bedrock Linux. Creativity is nice, and i am sure if you have a groundbreaking idea how to make Desktop computing better (except: make the same thing an existing distro does but ... better), there will be some devs that would be interested in your idea.
All Distros i listed have a vision:
Tiny Core Linux: an minimalist, modular graphical Linux.
Debian: the universal operating system. Numerous packages on all possible architectures.
Gentoo: An OS you build yourself for crazy developers and security freaks.
Arch Linux: The bleeding edge upstream distro. We have every package out there available as the developer build and intended it.
Nix OS: A "Purely Functional Linux Distribution" (never tried it)
Bedrock Linux: Puzzle **your** favorite distribution together. (never tried it)
Ubuntu: Make Debian an user-friendly, easy to use Distro.

[GI_Jack]

It's really a shame that there is no vision in the Linux community. We have a bunch of remasters of a handful of base distributions but no one tries to do anything truly unique with their offering.

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[GI_Jack]

Next Question: 2018. Lindows was buried well over 20 years ago. The world moved on. We saw GTK2 and now 3. Most hardware now has FOSS drivers thank you Theo De Raddt. FOSS video card drivers mostly "just work". We have official supported binaries for video drivers which are competitive if not superior to windows. We now have a mostly complete OpenGL stack, and fully complete proprietary OpenGL+OpenCL+Vulkan stack. A first rate platform.

Fonts are anti-aliased, we got flash support, then depreciated flash for HTML5 which we support under major web browsers. We have major web browser support. MP3 is now public domain. PNG is now mainstream. Most file formats are at least readable from Linux. Star Office was Freed as Open, then Libre Office. Wireless is now an official subsystem instead of a single driver. Monitoring and injection just works. Networking in general "just works" as does wifi for the most part.

Sound and soundcards mostly "just work" and is feature comparable if not superior to windows. Bluetooth also works pretty nicely, can plug in to both audio and networking. Far from trailing, GNU desktops like GNOME lead in UI/UX development and now seemless intergrate cloud, email, instant message, personal information, etc...

Wine has released version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and looks at 4, and projects like DXVK offer top notch DirectX support. ALl of this is available under most GNU Distros.

On top of all this, we have a phone userland android which is in use by most phones, with top tier support.

What does "Lindows" really offer here?

[Weasel]

GNU desktops like GNOME lead in UI/UX development

I see we have a comedian in this thread.