Linspire nears million-user mark

I torture-tested Linspire 5. It was an interesting experience. Some things were really nice, like everything worked out of the box on my Thinkpad- sound, power management, hotplug, and even the horrid AC97-based modem. Power management was awesome, I had it up for three weeks and put it repeatedly into hibernation without a glitch.

The distasteful bits were lots of commercials, not many programs in the Click n Run warehouse, and very limited installation options, like no custom partitioning. Their silly insistence on not providing an option during installation to create an unprivileged user is a huge mistake, but they don't think it's a problem. If the installer would require creating an unprivileged user I could like Linspire, but that's a deal-breaker. Why copy the worst features of Windows?

While I am no fan of Linspire, their recent Deal with Dell will insure Linspire's success and could mean a real gain for the Linux Desktop. Let's remember that Dell has been a MS shop for a long time. The fact that they now plan to promote any Linux Distro could have big ramifications for MS and for Linux.