LinuxForums has a review of Freespire 1.0 (screenshots): “I was very pleased and impressed by the quality of this distribution. It is a pity that Freespire isn’t completely “free” though, as you have to pay to use its preferred package manager. I really liked the fact that the distribution released an OSS version which didn’t include the proprietary and restricted pieces of software. This should help Freespire in getting a better reputation among Linux users. Freespire is a nice distribution with a lot of handy tools and great ideas. It is comfortable and easy to use. In its non-OSS version it comes pre-installed with Java, flash plugins, multimedia support and even spell checkers within its web and email applications.”
I’m currently on a quest for a distro that will support my laptop hardware out of the box. I had high hopes for Freespire with its proprietary this and that but still no luck. I’ll have to give ndiswrapper a try someday too.
Have you tried PCLinuxOS? I’ve got a Toshiba Tecra S1 and everything worked first time, including wireless. Sweet
“Most Linux distributions decided to give everything they could to the community. By becoming popular and by attracting users they could then provide paid support to the companies. This is a business model however in which companies like Mandriva or Linspire didn’t truly believe. It is probably their lack of faith and their fear of that model that convinced a lot of people not to use their distribution.”
Speaking as someone that has in the past worked in support I can tell you that there is a reason that Mandriva and Linspire do not trust this business model. Mandriva and Linspire have focused their business on end users rather than the enterprise. The simple fact of the matter is that end user support is at best not very profitable. In the vast majority of cases companies that provide end user support (even with the $20-$40 price tag on an issue) operate their support department at a loss. Enterprise support is quite a different animal. With enterprise support you can charge a lot more and the person that your agent is talking to is most of the time going to be savvy enough that the problem can be resolved quickly. You certainly will not have to spend 10 minutes explaining what you mean by “right-click on the Desktop icon”
Other than the missunderstanding about the realities of the end user support driven business model. This was a good article. I wonder if the inclusion of this proprietary code will be good for open source adoption or bad? I guess I cannot be to negative about it as long as I have that nVIDIA driver installed.
Everything you said is right on the money. But let me add a few more points:
Linspire’s business model revolves around selling subscriptions to CNR. Freespire doesn’t differ in this respect, and although they make it a little easier to access free software through 3rd-party repositories, this has been reported to break CNR in some cases.
The difference between Linspire and Freespire is that with Linspire you get a more thoroughly tested product (albeit with older software) for the price of the initial licensing fee. Not a bad deal for your average desktop user.
Kevin Carmony talks about a community oriented project, but this is an illusion. Linspire is not interested in letting the community drive the project. At best, when they finally manage to put up a public bug tracker, they can use the community to help shake out bugs before the they spin a Linspire release.
However, the primary purpose of Freespire is to provide a free beer desktop that helps convert the “community” into CNR subscriptions. This is a smart business model, but let’s consider that last question you raised: what does this mean for open source software?
CNR is the easiest system that I know of for delivering proprietary and/or commercial software on Linux. There has been very little work done to make CNR a viable package manager for free software. CNR has some compelling advantages for the end-user, who would likely prefer Linspire to Freespire. However, converting the open source community into CNR subscribers via Freespire is a bad thing for open source.
I’m curious what you mean by 3rd party repositories?
Freespire and Linspire repositories are supposed to be the same. At least the CNR repositories for freespire and apt repositories are supposed to be the same. With Freespire you have option to skip CNR and use apt-get to install synaptic. The repositories in Freespire for CNR and apt are the same AFAIK.
The only thing I would like to see them do is put synaptic in by default and perhaps leave the activation of CNR to the user. Let them decide what they want to use.
I happen to be somewhat in the middle. I like to use apt-get and I also like using CNR. I also understand that Linspire is a business and one has to make money in order to stay in business. CNR is worth the $20 a year they charge for basic service.
At this point in the game it is way to early to tell what direction freespire will take. A few with biases might attempt to predict, but in the end they might be surprised. At least I hope so.
I’m not a Freespire/Linspire user (obviously), so I could certainly be mistaken.
Does Freespire maintain its own APT repositories? I was under the impression that Freespire users use Debian’s APT repositories (hence 3rd party).
I know that CNR is the same for both Linspire and Freespire. However, in Freespire, can you use CNR to install most of the packages that you could install using apt-get (thus is/isn’t a viable OSS package manager)?
Does Freespire maintain its own APT repositories? I was under the impression that Freespire users use Debian’s APT repositories (hence 3rd party).
they have their own repositories “apt.freespire.org”
I maybe mistaken but I believe CNR uses the same repos, however CNR wont list things that require uninstalling something else.. Ideally you could install everything in CNR w/o having to remove something
While I never had much hope for Linspire and it’s attempt to emulate proprietary operating systems, Freespire may be able to gain more traction. While early versions of Lindows may have been stripped down “n00b” versions of Linux that tried their best emulate Windows, later versions up to the current 5.0 and Freespire versions have grown into rather competent desktop distributions. As commercial software gains traction on Linux, CNR might become a lucrative and viable business model.
Sounds like it would be a wise choice of Freespire to follow Mepis: Base the distribution on Kubuntu, some additional artwork and tweaks and CNR-warehouse.
What I miss on Freespire or Linspire is YaST. I would like to see a port of YaST to Debian.
“The boot time on my machine was 2 min 40.”
How can that be possibly called ‘fast’? My Suse 10.1 distributions boots up in about 70-80 seconds from Grub screen to a functional KDE desktop! True, I fiddled a bit with the services that are started up, but not that much.
WindowsXP boots up in 30-60 seconds… MacOSX I’m not sure, but I suspect that’s fast as well…
But two minutes and 40 seconds? Seriously that’s too much for a desktop-oriented distribution…