Whatever Happened to These Red-Hot Linux Distros?

:)

Still makes me grumpy how all these great distros existed, and had really new-user-friendly configuration tools, but when Ubuntu showed up it got praised as the firstest most easiestest user-friendliestest distro evar. It really was not.

Linspire was one of the easiest, most advanced Linux desktop for every-day users. Many of its user friendly tools and features didn't show up in other distros until years later. And of course Canonical took all the credit.

I happened to really like Linspire myself cmost..

I have nothing to add except that I thought it was a reallly good article.

With regards to Ubuntu I would say that if you look at Distrowatch ratings back when Ubuntu first started the average daily download on Distrowatch was 1400 for the number 1 distro. When Ubuntu came along that number went up to 2400. That has to be a good thing.

The other thing to note is that whilst Ubuntu went up to 2400 the numbers for other distros weren't affected meaning all those Ubuntu downloads were coming from elsewhere and not people just switching.

@jacog

> Still makes me grumpy how all these great distros existed, and had really new-user-friendly configuration tools, but when Ubuntu showed up it got praised as the firstest most easiestest user-friendliestest distro evar. It really was not.

I'm completely with you on that. When Baboontu 1st came out, it even had those free ShipIt CDs it spread around in order to try getting World desktop domination. Even BEFORE Baboontu reached bacterial hyperinfection status of its OS+fanbois, you were all too often scrw'd if you got shipped a bad CD or anything else went wrong with your install ...then you really needed a NOboontu livecd to try fixing things up!

2c