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An Early Look at Freespire Linux
An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com takes an early look at Freespire Linux in a recent article. Linspire will be releasing their first version of Freespire, the first community Linux distribution to include many third-party proprietary codecs, drivers, and software. From the article: 'While I still have my doubts about the long-term wisdom of using proprietary software and drivers with Linux, I must say that if you feel you need to use such programs, Freespire makes it much easier than any other Linux distribution. And, when is all said and done, that's really what Freespire is all about -- making Linux as easy as possible for users.'"
Proprietary software, as long as it doesn't make the system less free, is not necessarily bad.
For example a proprietary document system that uses open formats and has open APIs does very little to harm the user and potentially fills a niche that cannot be served by free software very well (eg handles certain legal compliance issues, which requires expensive insurance and research).
As long as you *could* write your own software to replace bits of the system, or interoperate with the system, then you dont necessarily have to for the benefit to be very real indeed.
A lot (although not all) of the stuff that comes with Linspire falls into this category.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Seems Linspire is moving to the business model of giving away the software and charging
.deb packages but they don't all follow the same source trees and you can /usr/local may be the safest path in this case, and
for the support.
I agree with the notion that 'non-free' software with an 'open' api and documented
formats is not a true evil and should be allowed as a choice on a free system. If you
use such an application you are not truly locked in to it as you can migrate your data.
The only problem I see with Freespire is the same one I see with other Debian clones.
They may use
end up with a broken system by mixing packages from different archives. That's a problem
because may want an application that is only available from a different archive tree than the
one your system was installed from and run into dependancy problems. (Installing
the desired package from source into
even this isn't foolproof.)
It's easier for an expert to kill X than it is for a n00b to start it. It's not like XP where the CLI is an afterthought. It's there, just like back in the olden days of Windows, running under the GUI.
If you don't like it, don't use it. For me, I'm looking for a linux system that works BEFORE I start working on it. Give me a working system, then let me customize it. I don't have the chops to build a linux box from the ground up, and while that puts me in the minority here, I'm very firmly in the majority over the general population on this one.
I'm hoping this gives the linux movement a bit more momentum, even if it does do so at the expense of tarnishing the OSS camps' dreams just a bit.
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
I'm actually partial to the color scheme in Ubuntu (my choice of distro). I have an asian themed room and the subdued tones mesh very well with the colors of the room. (Using the 'Dawn of Ubuntu' wallpaper, the tree with the faded sky behind it)
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
What sometimes gets left out of this kind of discussion is that closed-source drivers are often of very low quality. Recently, I've been scanning in an old 400-page book on an HP scanner, using HP's closed-source MacOS 9 driver and scanning software. The MacOS X driver wasn't released until a couple of years after we bought the scanner, although they claimed it would be coming "real soon now." When the MacOS X driver finally was released, I found that it crashed so often as to make it useless. So here I am, in the year 2006, booting into MacOS 9 whenever I want to use the scanner. IIRC a driver is available for SANE, but I think I had dependency problems getting it to instal on my Linux box.
I scanned the first 100 pages or so, transferred them to the Linux box, and made sure I could read them. No problem. I finished scanning the book, transferred the rest of the pages to the Linux box. Oops --- can't read anything after page 250. Why? It turns out all those files are empty --- zero bytes in size. Why? Oh, the Mac's hard disk had apparently filled up, and the software didn't check for an I/O error when it wrote the files.
I'm not saying that OSS is always perfect and bug-free, but I doubt that this kind of low-quality code would ever have become widely used if it was open source.
I don't really want closed-source drivers for Linux. All I want is two things:
- I want to be able to find clear, accurate, up-to-date information on what devices have OSS drivers available, so I can buy hardware that's well supported.
- I want to be able to install the OSS drivers without a lot of hassles.
Really, #1 seems to be pretty well covered by the SANE folks (although the situation seems to be worse for wireless cards, where there's a ton of out-of-date info on the web, and I didn't find any canonical, well-maintained site that had all the info). #2 is probably slowly getting better too, as Ubuntu becomes more and more mature. I suspect that by the time I upgrade to the next Ubuntu, the scanner driver I need will already be included in SANE by default, and the dependency problems will be fixed.Find free books.
Coincidentally, I discovered today that Linspire/Freespire are standardizing on Haskell for core OS development. I'm still blinking a bit about that one, but you have to give them marks for chutzpah.
I agree. This gives me a good chance to see it for myself: test the waters, so to speak, before passing it along to the less initiated. From the description, it sounds like a killer distro: I'd love to have proprietary codecs and the like installed out of the box. If this distro ends up being all it's cracked up to be, I might just subscribe to the click and run even though I know how to use apt-get already: just to support it.
Of course, I'll have to really give credance to the FSF's take on proprietary software first: I'd hate to be damaging progress for the sake of convenience, if that really is the end consequence.
It's amazing how many of my classmates I've converted to Ubuntu because they saw how sexy it was with proper theming and the use of a few desklets. Yes, even to senior level computer science students, eye candy sells.
...Of course, once they actually tried it out and used the slick features like apt-get the first time, they were head over heels.
The ratio of linux leeters who decry freespire or linspire, yet maintain a windows partition "for video games" or "well, my work makes me us blah blah so ..." and other sorts of non-pure cop outs. How many are running some peripheral with a binary blob? I bet the hypocrisy ratio is quite high in that regard. How about using websites that are hosted on non pure, or use something else non-pure? Do they boycott those websites? How about brick and mortar stores? Do they inquire what apps and OS the parent company uses, and if it is "non pure" do they put their squawk where their material goods lust is and boycott? It's like, how far do you want o take it. Seems every company out there that tries to make linux *useable* with a default install gets dissed severely. Yet...you can go to EVERY major distro out there and find the wink wink non nod instructions on getting the non pure stuff up and running. Fedora, mandrake, debian, gentoo, ubuntu, all of them, easy-peasy to find all the instructions necessary to make non pure but functional and find the relevant off shore someplace links to the repositories.
I'd bet more than a weeks pay that the number of linux users using ONLY "pure" open and free software is less than 1%.
No. No 'we' don't.
Windows has been around in its' current incarnation for 11 years now. During the course of that 11 years it has remained decently consistent in its' interface and has provided a reliable mechanism to do tasks (keyboard shortcuts, cut and paste, etc).
There are places where the UI violates good UI design (too many nested menus, for instance), but for those minor problems, Linux is no better.
Half of the reason, my friends, that KDE and GNOME are busy playing catch-up with Windows is that they do not have a better way of doing things either.
The ease of use of Linux is still very variable from distribution to distribution. In gui terms Linux is far more illogical than Windows simply because you never know what you're gonna get.
Only someone wrapped up in their hatred of Microsoft could dismiss windows' strenths out of hand...this is even more obvious when considering the fact that linux has the same exact flaws and many more to boot!
Because they've fallen for the same trap as Microsoft Windows: They put the button you push to turn the machine off in a sub menu of the button you push to start your work! What could possibly be next? Insert headers and footers in the View menu on the Freespire-customized version of OpenOffice.org?
May god save us all.