Rainer Blessing's Site

I bought and installed Linspire a few days ago. Previous owners get Linspire 5.0 for free if they subscribe to a Click and Run membership. I got Linspire 4.5 already for free. Promotional Codes were posted on some sites which offered a free developer version. But I also payed for an insider membership and payed altogether more than I would if I bought Windows XP.
I already have a fully functional Debian installation with KDE 3.4. Linspire only has KDE 3.3 and some other applications are not the newest version. But for that I get a “better” working system where I have less work to configure things myself.
I still had to configure the sound servers and sound applications. The KDE control panel for the sound severs, Linspire uses Arts and Jack, crashed a lot if I changed settings. I didn’t manage to use Amarok with streamed audio. On my Debian installation I use the gestreamer-arts output plugin, but I did get no sound in Linspire. Linspire should use just one sound server this would make configuration easier. I tried other applications like LSongs, Juk, and XMMS but none played streamed audio. Linspire support advised me to use KPlayer which works, but I’d rather have used AmaroK.
Everything else worked though. The desktop (icons and taskbar) looks very pretty. The fonts are more numerous and better looking than on my Debian installation (I could probably have installed it all as well on my Debian installation, but it would have taken time to collect and configure the fonts. ).
Click and Run, the software repository, is also nice. It is like dselect with screenshots. The CNR repository also contains a lot of software for developers, like all kinds of compilers and libraries. I didn’t have to use any debian packages until now.
The installation was flawless and very fast. It took about 15 minutes and every hardware was correctly detected and setup. But I use very common hardware so this is not too surprising.
The support was also good. I had two easy software questions which were answered satisfactory and fast.
I tried/worked with a lot of operating systems (Windows, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, the major and some minor Linux distributions)in the past and I would say I like Linspire the best. It needs not a lot of time to maintain. It looks pretty and has most of the functions I want. There is unfortunately is no instance of my ideal OS but Linspire comes the closest.