Linspire's CNR beta supports Ubuntu HardyHeron

Who cares?

Making their service even less relevant is that RealPlayer 11 supports Windows Media. That was apparently one of the big selling points of CNR. All a distro would have to do to support Windows Media out of the box now is get permission to include RealPlayer. (Haven't tried it myself.)

CNR reminds me of the PBI files in PC-BSD. At least the PC-BSD crew is now keeping the PBIs up to date.

But having too many layers of package management doesn't seem like a good idea. I don't know if CNR dovetails with apt or rpm ...

> CNR reminds me of the PBI files in PC-BSD.

I hadn't thought about that, but they are very similar. Except that PBI's worked when I tried them and CNR did not.

When I first tried the PBIs in PC-BSD 1.3, I wasn't impressed at all. The apps were more than a few versions behind, and all of them didn't work.

But now they're really on top of it. They all work, and they're all up to date. If the PC-BSD upgrade to 1.5 didn't run worse for me than 1.4, I'd still be using it right now. I'm not a big fan of KDE, even though I like many of the apps (KOffice, Krita, K3b), and I was all set to run Fluxbox in PC-BSD (at least they give you an out-of-the-box alternative to KDE), but having my X configuration look worse, with identical xorg.conf files, was too much for me to take.

In PC-BSD, though, the package management is even more confusing. You have PBIs from PC-BSD, then you have binary packages AND uncompiled ports from FreeBSD.

> all together now:

All you need is love.

Whoops, sorry. Wrong subject matter.

> I'm not a big fan of KDE

That's why I just couldn't get interested in PC-BSD. They make it pretty clear that you should use KDE if you want run PC-BSD. I read horror stories of users wasting time trying unsuccessfully to get Gnome installed.

Some parts of Arch were borrowed from BSD, and I like that, but that's close enough for me.