Linspire 8.7 Trying To Lure Windows Users With Switch From KDE To MATE Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linspire 8.7 Trying To Lure Windows Users With Switch From KDE To MATE Desktop

Linspire is still kicking in 2020 as the Linux distribution formerly known as "Lindows" more than a decade ago. Linspire 8.7 is out today with a renewed emphasis on trying to get legacy Windows PCs migrated to Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linspire-8.7-Released

[ALRBP]

[On their website] "The leading Open Source Desktop Alternative"
"Leading". Are they serious?
I didn't even know they still existed.
Are there real good reasons for a user coming from Windows to use Linspire, and pay 30$, instead of Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora?

[adlerhn]

Are there real good reasons for a user coming from Windows to use Linspire, and pay 30$, instead of Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora?

Phone support? I can see this being useful to non-advanced users.

[uid313]

With GNOME you can also get an experience a bit like that one of Windows by installing the extensions Dash-to-panel and ArcMenu.

[ALRBP]

Phone support? I can see this being useful to non-advanced users.

At first, it may sound like a reason but, in practice, I'm not sure. Most Windows people I know never call MS support, instead, they call me ! (somewhat ridiculous, since they spend much more time using Windows than me; my W8/10 experience is very limited) For some of them, I just refuse to perform any Windows support (MS gets money for that, me doing it for free would be a gift to MS) and suggest installing Linux, which I will support; (with some success) but this is not always possible/practical (Windows-only software), so I still have to perform Windows support in some cases.

[andyprough]

Makes sense now that Fedora want to refocus QE resources on their primary Workstation Desktop. That means significant less testing on KDE and XFCE and that comes with an impact on those upstreams.

XFCE and MATE will likely do better in this case. It’s GTK-based, less complex, more stable and less code.

This is comedy gold. "Fedora has reassigned one of their part-time volunteers. I guess that's the end of the KDE and XFCE projects!" Brilliant!

[RahulSundaram]

This is comedy gold. "Fedora has reassigned one of their part-time volunteers. I guess that's the end of the KDE and XFCE projects!" Brilliant!

You can't reassign volunteers. That doesn't make sense. What has happened is that the QE team which has several Red Hat employees and volunteers have made a decision to tweak the release criteria so that not every application included in a spin is automatically considered release critical. It is a fairly minor change

[J.G.]

[On their website]Are there real good reasons for a user coming from Windows to use Linspire, and pay 30$, instead of Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora?

Their Freespire is a no cost download ($16 for a boxed version) but doesn't come with licenses and the like.
I guess the Linspire version is a good solution for people who are new to Linux, don't want to deal with communities, have Chrome, Skype and codecs preinstalled, and have phone and email support available. $30 for that doesn't seem bad to me.

Plus: I'm not at all opposed to people trying to sell a version of their open source based software, especially when they have a version without non-free elements available at no cost.

[andyprough]

andyprough I said XFCE and MATE would be less impacted. Don’t twist my words.

And please don’t disregard professional’s hard work on QE. It’s tedious work that really requires competencies and motivation. Here’s some quotes from one of the QE engineers:

“Hello, I have been doing the KDE "all applications must work" test for more than two years already and I can tell you, that some of the KDE pre-installed applications are of low quality, if not broken already.”

...

“In case of a reported bug, the readiness of KDE developers to fix it usually is lower when compared to Gnome, so sometimes there are bugs that will never be fixed, because they are not as severe as to block the release completely, so they get ship over and over again.”

Congratulations on finding someone who prefers Gnome over KDE to quote. That must have been a very difficult research project for you. Did you ask Siri, or Alexa?

[skeevy420]

andyprough I said XFCE and MATE would be less impacted. Don’t twist my words.

And please don’t disregard professional’s hard work on QE. It’s tedious work that really requires competencies and motivation. Here’s some quotes from one of the QE engineers:

“Hello, I have been doing the KDE "all applications must work" test for more than two years already and I can tell you, that some of the KDE pre-installed applications are of low quality, if not broken already.”

“In case of a reported bug, the readiness of KDE developers to fix it usually is lower when compared to Gnome, so sometimes there are bugs that will never be fixed, because they are not as severe as to block the release completely, so they get ship over and over again.”

That person isn't wrong. And in the case of atomic desktops, outside of a small, small handful of applications, a lot of the defaults can and should be removed.

Take the current F32. It ships an older Firefox than F31...or I can use Discover and install a newer version than what F31 ships from Flathub. Silverblue wont even need to ship a web browser once that Gnome plugin search and update tool thingy from that other thread is ready.

I need to sign up for a Fedora account. The fact that Silverblue doesn't ship with the xorg amdgpu driver is a very glaring omission.