LindowsOS Softens Microsoft-Compatibility Claim

jukal writes: "As seen originally at newsforge: On Friday we reported the appearance of Microtel PCs with LindowsOS pre-installed at Walmart.com. Then, Walmart.com and Lindows were claiming that LindowsOS 'delivers the stability of UNIX with the ease of Windows and the ability to run most Microsoft programs.' Today, that last phrase has gone missing and there is no more talk of running any programs designed for Windows, let alone Microsoft products"

Comments

How Long Before

[JohnHegarty]

"most Microsoft programs"

How long before "most Microsoft programs" have little bits of code added to shot them working on anything but offical microsoft windows.. that really would be the end of lindows

Quite similar actually

[OpCode42]

Promises one thing... delivers another. Its well on the way to MS territory already! ;)

A little too early

[Iscariot_]

Is it just me, or is giving linux to the consumer this early a bad thing? I'm sure Lindows is great and all, but your average Joe buying a PC from wallmart for $700 is NOT going to want to run linux applications, much less deal with managing the OS. I still think linux (or in this case Lindows) has a long way to go.

Am I wrong? Do people that buy PCs from walmart frequent this site?

Re:A little too early

[morgajel]

users come in waves. think of us as explorers, and these people as a wave of settlers. they don't know what they hell they're doing, but they're pretty sure there's a better life out there, and they're willing to try it.

Re:A little too early

[rseuhs]

You are wrong.

PCs preloaded with Lindows are not replacing Windows-preloaded PCs (or well, not primarily), they replace OS-free PCs that Walmart already sells for quite some time.

Lindows-PCs are perfect for those tasks IMO:

• People who want to put their own OS on it (either an existing or pirated copy of Windows or Linux or something else)
• PCs used only for email, web and simple office stuff. Yes, I do think that it's ready for grandma, too. It's preloaded after all and I assume they test their hardware against it, too.
• PC terminals. For example at our universtity, there are tens of PCs used for administrative purposes (students can subscribe to courses, exams etc.) and all those PCs ever do in their whole livetime is run one browser-window that shows the institute's website. The only reason why those PCs currently run IE/Windows is because it was preinstalled.
• Yes also *gasp* people who want to check out Linux and don't want to mess much with installation. The cheapest LindowsPC costs as much as a full retail copy of Windows XP pro. (300$) Hell, why not?

Lindows costs not much if anything, I don't see a complelling reason NOT TO put it on PCs that would otherwise be sold without an OS.

Kinda better wording actually.

[MarvinMouse]

I think the new wording is better, and perhaps a bit more accurate for two reasons.

1. It doesn't accidentally promote windows products or even microsoft products. It lets you know that Lindows is a completely new OS, but it "delivers the stability of Linux with the ease of Windows." As well, it now lets you know that instead of having to return to the old Windows products, which were known to be buggy. There are new products made specifically for Lindows that will fit your needs (Which may or may not be buggy, but there is the chance that they aren't). This is the first really good reason for the change, because now a new user will feel that instead of just getting another computer like the rest of the world, he's riding the wave of a "exciting new OS". :-)

2. As well, now it is more accurate. Originally it used a lot of terms making it appear as though Lindows was a UNIX operating system, when it is really a Linux one. This would deter customers since UNIX has a sorta connotation of difficulty to it for newbies (who have just kinda heard of it from users who just touched it and saw commands like egrep, col, ls, and wc ;-), but Linux doesn't have as difficult of an aura around it. Thus, it is more accurate, and also more likely to sell to the ordinary computer user.

To be honest, their new wording is considerably better then the old one. IMHO.

Re:And the people buying PCs from Wal-Mart....

[ScannerBoy]

"And the people buying PCs from Wal-Mart....Need to run Linux? Their boxen would get r00ted faster than people who didn't patch their apache yet."

Uh huh, and just last week you were complaining that these same people are zelots and run windows because its spoon fed to them. Why don't we just kill them and forget the whole thing? Oh wait, that would be mean.

Broken link

[ezs]

http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/06/18/1344258.sh tml?tid=23

The Real Reason is...

[idfrsr]

It will run "most Microsoft programs"....

The phrase had to be removed, because not even Windows can run "most Microsoft programs".

Re:And the people buying PCs from Wal-Mart....

[thesolo]

Wait, with XP and the ability to get raw socket access, we're in trouble anyway.

OT, but here we go. You know, with the increasing ease of creating a worm or a virus that can take over a machine, kill routers, flood mailservers, etc., how long will it be before computers start getting treated like cars? i.e. They have their purposes, but you need to have a license to use one legally.

Frankly, I'm just waiting until this happens, or rather until someone at least proposes the idea in a bill. Of course, if the CBDTPA passes, we essentially wouldn't have computers anymore anyway.

Claim was out there

[Erasmus Darwin]

Linux emulation of Windows is making some impressive strides, but we all know that claim was a bit out there. Hell people commented on it back in the original story. John Q. Enduser wouldn't have been happy when his random, off-the-shelf Windows software didn't run on his new Lindows box.

And yet despite that, we've already got plenty of people raising the possibility that it's due to evil legal manuevering by Microsoft. Sometimes I wonder just how paranoid some of the Slashdotters out there really are.

(Disclaimer: I'm secretly receiving money, women, and youth rejuvenation treatments from Microsoft in exchange from posting pro-Microsoft comments here. I've also been instructed to bribe both RMS and Linus into joining our organization.)

Hmm

[ins0m]

No, I doubt many people who buy prepackaged comps from walmart actively follow /. However, what I do think is great is that the concept of linux is being offered right next to the Blue Light Special on aisle 5. Seriously, even if the "W" word is missing from the current marketing campaign, the fact remains that the hybrid-ish OS is widely available to people who may never have heard of *nix, or may have only heard of it in context with the "geek" community.

So long as Lindows remains in that sort of distribution circle, I have a feeling that more people are going to gain exposure, and even if touted as interoperable with most MS programs, most people only care about surfing websites, word processing, and gaming. So long as Lindows can perform with Win* on that regard, they should be fine; if the comparable cost of a PC pre-installed with "L" vs. "W" is low enough, it should be a success.

Hell, people may just be excited when they see that their fav porn sites pop up quicker. But for a moderate linux user (freebsd is my fav. os), I find that Mandrake is not hard to install or configure; anything easier than that will definitely have a mass consumer base. It's just a matter of keeping it on the shelves; I applaud the move of removing "Windows" from their promo, so long as they aren't going to get hosed for name-brand recognition entirely by doing so.

Re:Hmm

[jonadab]

I concur.

This is a good thing. Most people have very vague notions about what Windows and Microsoft even are; the advertising campaigns have some of them believing that it's an important part of computing, but only because all computers seem to have these buzzwords "Windows" and "Microsoft" attached to them. Exposure to the idea that computers don't need these buzzwords is a good thing.

In terms of user experience, users want to do a few simple things:

• Send and receive email, without understanding anything about how email works. When someone sends them an image attachment, they want it to just display for them, and have a clearly visible "print" button. They also want to be able to exchange inane animated greeting cards (the ones spammers deploy to collect email addresses), so they'll need the Flash plugin. But they don't have even the foggiest notion what a "plugin" is, and they shouldn't have to.
• Print stuff out. This means mostly pictures, bog-standard word-processing documents (letters, resumés, garage sale signs, ... nothing complicated), and the kind of thing people used to use Print Shop for in the 80s (mostly inane greeting cards with cheesy clip art, but these days they want to do this in color; banners are also popular). Printing pictures is no problem. Word Processing is no problem; Open Office is serious overkill for these people. The thing that remains in this category is the cheesy greeting-card/certificate/banner printing package, and I've discovered that people will crawl over broken glass to do this stuff. The software can be _horrific_ (a la Print Artist) and they'll _LOVE_ it. Quality is not necessary, and ease of use is really not important either, as long as it will let them insert stupid clip art and style bits of text with shadow and outline effects and stuff, and give them prefab templates to modify. Currently I don't know of a Linux app that fits this bill, but maybe that's because I wasn't looking.
• Surf the web. This shouldn't be a problem. I've been deploying Mozilla for a while now at a public library, where the people who use it have no PC at home and know virtually nothing, and Mozilla works fine; I get very few complaints, and those I do get have to do with printing or with the difficulty of navigating certain sites.
• Play silly little games. Not a problem. Give em a dozen kinds of Solitaire, Gnome Mines, Iagno, and a handful of others, and they'll be happy playing them quite literally forever. (Yes, there are also people who want cool games, new games, 3D shooters, and such, but those people are younger and know more about computers.)
• That's pretty much it. Most people don't know they can do more than this with computers.

I'm glad Wall-Mart is no longer claiming that LindowsOS runs most MS programs. Lindows was not ready for that claim. But Linux *is* ready, or very close to ready, for the consumer desktop, as long as it comes preinstalled and preconfigured. I worry just a little about the silly-greeting-card thing... developers don't do such inane things, and I don't know whether anyone has put together a Print Artist equivalent for Linux.

Re:is this a suprise?

[analog_line]

Sorry, we Mac users already have a highly functional, highly stable, and highly usable UNIX operating system that comes free when you buy the machine, that also happens to run most free software (beer or speech) you might want to use.

Thanks for drinking Coke. Play again.

Walmart woes

[gad_zuki!]

"I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it. And look, there's Magnetbox, and Sorny!"

Anyone consider the fallout from this when a few hundred Walmart shoppers rant about how Linux is a cheap rip-off of Windows? Lindows may end up being a huge propaganda loss for Linux.

Then why?

[mshiltonj]

If Lindows is not windows compatible, then what are users paying for? Why not just put Mandrake (or other desktop-friendly distrib)?

Lindows (tm)
"Our name sounds like Windows and starts with an 'L'. We are clever."

Click 'N Run Warehouse -- $99/year for GPL apps

[jaaron]

If you read the article or check Lindow's site you'll notice the part about they're Click 'N Run warehouse. With a $99/year membership you can get any software out of it you want. When you buy Lindows you get three free downloads to start.

The whole Click 'N Run Warehouse confused me when I first read about it. $99 a year to download essentially GPLed applications? If you check the warehouse, you'll notice most of the applications there are the sort that you'll usually find included in any large distrobution. Everything from gcc to OpenOffice is there. Now why in the world would you pay $99 a year to access applications that are already free? Well, that was my question, so I emailed Lindows and they responded promptly saying that: (1) Lindows is a debian based distro, so you can download .debs and install them yourself, (2) you can of course get the tools to make the software yourself from source, or (3) you can get it from the warehouse. Now why would you want to do that? Because it's "one click and you're up and running." No worry about configuration or install scripts. Considering this, I think Lindows is justified in charging for the software since they really are adding something of value (convenience) to the end user. Linux geeks can still install the software the old fashoned way too.

Licensing

[Moderation abuser]

Check the license requirements on your Windows software. You may well find that you are *not licensed* to use it on anything but a Microsoft Windows operating system.

Re:Licensing

[gorf]

License? What license? I don't recall ever signing an license...