Lindows, the weird Walmart Linux from 2002! 

wasn't michaelsoft bimbows a hardware store?

​@@SimplyAlonsoand a repair shop

Haha I forgot about that place!

Please tell me you all saw the RU-vid of the guy who went to the location just recently!

@@der.Schtefan I think… but I’ll rewatch it

A lot of windows apps at the time, especially games, expected no access restrictions because they ran on Win98. So to run those in Lindows you’d have to be root… Consumer Windows didn’t get real restricted accounts until XP.

@@paradoxmo You wouldn't have to be root. Wine Administrator != Linux root user. Wine runs all Windows programs "as administrator" by default under the wine prefix while running as a normal user in Linux.

@@klementineQt yes, that’s the case now, but it wasn’t really the case then. Back then you needed root to have direct access to the video card. Now there’s DRI and framebuffer APIs, which make this unnecessary.

@@klementineQt kinda off topic but you just know youre a nerd when you use != instead of =/=. and hey maybe youre not a nerd.. but id bet my 5 dollars on it

@@finnisnotafish Maybe they happen to be nerds who like Erlang, instead of nerds who like C-like languages. Any Prolog connoisseur out there using =\=? Ah, but what if you use "≠"? Maybe it qualifies as a unicode nerd? [edit: it could qualify you as an APL nerd in any case]

Back when Linux compatibility was a minefield, they were super popular for exactly that. Putting a system together was super specific back in the day unless you wanted to learn kernel stuff and I just wanted to use the computer for production work in the labs, so it was very easy to sell any Linux using labs on Lindows boxen for test farms that were just going to load whatever they wanted anyhow.

Exactly what I did. I bought one for my father, but installed Mandrake on it (which was the Linux distro I was using at the time. Problem was, the particular model of CD drive the system shipped with had an incompatibility with Mandrake or the kernel version of the time, and it would immediately brick the CD drive. Of course, I was already familiar with the hacks of getting applications working under wine, so getting things working there would have been easy for me.

I ran Mandrake on a little Acer laptop in like 1999. Unfortunately, it didn't support the shitty Winmodem that was in the machine, and all I had at home was dialup. So I could only use it at school where I had access to ethernet.

@@johnalbert2102 man, winmodems were the scourge of my early Linux days. Once I figured out how to dial up from a Windows box and NAT that over to a Linux system (Windows ICS was a feature as early as Win98SE), I was golden. I did find some success with a PCMCIA modem on a Linux laptop back then. I was able to dial up from my grandparents house with our AT&T dialup creds, and thought I was all that and a bag of chips. :)

Mandrake was awesome at that time, made me switch to Linux back in the day

From a marketing point of view some kind of single user mode definitely made sense for average home users at that time. People used to Windows 9.x and MacOS 9.x were frequently like "Why on earth should I have to select a user and type in a password just to get my computer to work???". My first MacOS X device didn't have a password set up until I used it to play music in a youth camp. At that point I set up a user password and a password protected screensaver because I was essentially leaving the laptop unattended among semi-strangers.

​@@Ragnar8504 in that case I would just lock the laptop in a box

@@nirui.o That was a spontaneous decision at a place in the middle of nowhere. Imagine a place in the foothills of the alps, double-digit inhabitants, where a hired coach dropped us off on Friday morning and picked us up again on Sunday afternoon. Someone had the idea that it might be nice to play some quiet background music so I plopped the laptop on top of the upright piano and had it play random songs through the internal speakers. I just didn't want any of the teenagers nosing around on my hard drive and needed a quick solution for that. Setting up a password achieved exactly what I wanted and tool all but two minutes.

It was a poor choice by Michael Robertson to have the distribution default to running as the root user even at that time, but had you been there trying to solve the problems he was as a not-that-linux-technical of a user you'd better understand the ease of use problem that permission issues presented to non-technical users and why that was done. It's not an excuse, but let's talk time frame and what Lindows was trying to compete with... It wasn't until XP's release in 2001 that users started encountering filesystem permission issues. During the development of this version of Lindows the competition was Microsoft Windows 98, not XP. 98 and ME didn't have filesystem permissions. Poor decision? Sure, but mostly because Michael Robertson should have understood (the company did have one XP system keeping an eye on their competition) what was coming out shortly, the backlash from the GNU/Linux world that would result from this choice, and the issues he'd actually be creating by running everything as root. Some applications would scream bloody murder when you ran them as root within Lindows (which could have been fixed, but re-building the software without the warnings...well that wasn't the optimal solution). Effectively running everything as root just moved where the usability issue was. Humorously almost every real issue that existed in Lindows has been resolved by Linux Mint for a very long time now. Filesystem permission challenges were resolved with ext4 formatted disks somewhat recently and Linux Mint has a right-click option in the file manager to open a folder as the root user. That solves the usability issue for doing certain tasks like making a backup of your home folder and editing files where you need root permissions without having to open up a terminal and learn 'technical stuff'. About the time ~ Linspire 5 was released almost every complaint of significance in the GNU/Linux world had been addressed.The source code was released for the in-house developed apps, users no longer ran as root by default, Wine was gone in favor of native Linux apps, and while there could still be some criticism for the inclusion of proprietary drivers it was only slightly worse by comparison to other distributions in the libre sense. That was also an unwise decision I think, but it was for practical rather than ethical reasons primarily that they should have remove proprietary components rather than add them to improve hardware support. What that did was move the hardware support problems down the road rather than solving them. The company really should have sold computers and accessories directly that could be properly supported to resolve these issues rather than try and make the distribution work with the hardware people already owned cause that is only ever a temporary 'fix' that will later cause users issues the way GNU/Linux is developed (aka if you have to upgrade from one release to the next once a year or once every couple years you're guaranteed to have customers facing problems when their hardware no longer works that you told them to buy prior to solve the same issue).

Honestly, for a cheaper system: I bet that even today, people might be willing to trade price and security (at least on some level).

I would love to see you cover the Freespire OS that the Xandros team I believe is running as the community version of this OS

I had a Duron 850 back then. That is what turned me onto AMD.

Best thing about Duron is almost all of them were overclocking champs. Gains of at least 25% were normal. 800 MHz clocked up to 1 GHz without even trying.

i loved my duron at the time, none of my friends could compete with it since they had about the same budget as me lol

And if you knew how and selected/tested a good piece, you could overclock it to almost 2GHz

yh, windows installers would usually have been named setup.exe

why couldn't they use freedos

@@HamguyBaconI wonder that sometimes - it had been in development for several years by this time.

@@HamguyBacon they'd need something that runs a virtual machine or emulation, similar to how dos apps run under the NT kernel or Dosbox.

DOS apps do direct hardware access, Emulators fake that with a Hardware abstraction layer. Since WINE is specifically not an Emulator, and the mess that Millennium Edition(ME) made in 2000 creating a HAL for everything DOS (Duke wouldn't run on ME either)

great! can you tell us what was the aim of the project? was WINE developers on board? and what happened with $20m? 😅

Wine was not on board. I remember how much anti lindows was spreading throughout the linux community

@@jaybrooks1098 Agreed, and I guess I understand why, Bill and Steve were very very different than Satya is today, so things not what they are today.

I started with Debian long long long ago, but one day on a spur I tried Freespire 2 and actually liked it and kept it until linspire/freespire demise in what 2009/10? when Xandros bought them out. miss the freespire forums.

@@jaybrooks1098 It was the case then and still is the case now with Linspire! The Linux community hate the anti-openness, proprietary drivers, codecs and bloatware of their distro, Very much against what Linux community is about. Bagging a deal with Walmart was probably the start of their commercial ambitions.

How to run Linux programs on Windows? The only tool I know is WSL1 and that's discontinued.

@@jacquelineliu2641 Ah, then you missed the release of WSL 2! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux#WSL_2

Xandros was easier to install than Windows. Friendlier too, it installed .Deb and .rpm files for you

Wine still sucks at running normal Windows programs because its implementation of GDI, common controls, etc. are very bad. Games are a different story since they draw their own UI.

At some point Mandriva also used to be able to do that with LinDVD.

Yes!!! This! , I learned about computers and am an expert today because I grew up when it took a miracle to get software to run properly in the early 90s, and it never ran the same twice. Miss those days 😢

A lot of the time, the auto installers didn't work, but just running the Setup.exe in the setup or install folder did work. 800x600 or 1024x768 was standard Res for most games.

9 out of 10 times you just need to install the latest Visual C runtime update. Occasionally you have to run the update on the game disc in the redistributable folder for a specific dll.

@@lance862 That kind of info was so much harder to find as a kid in the late 90s! My parents limited my Internet time to 30 minutes per day (in case someone was trying to call) and it wasn't uncommon for pages to take up to a minute to load. I ended up saving a lot of .htm's to read offline but still barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to learn.

I still use Slackware. I'm on 15, finally, and loving it.

@@anon_y_mousse I had a long history of trying out different distros back in the day... from Debian to Gentoo to CRUX and then finally settling on Arch Linux back in 2004 (Arch was modeled after CRUX) as well as all random sub-variants in between like Mint, Fedora, Kali, etc... I'm so psyched to hear Slackware is still being produced, I'll have to check it out on an older PC I am restoring!

you had a "straight edge" bumper sticker JESUS CHRIST LMAO

@@ScarfaceTHPS It was the 90's man. 😅

I think you mean early 2000s, knoppix wasnt released until 2000.

@@PineappleForFun Yeah that's what I meant. Corrected. My brain was saying 2000s but my fingers wrote 90s and I didn't check before commenting. lol

I loved KDE3 this brings back many memories... and makes me think of KDE4 and I become angry.

Loved Knoppix and all the distros on CD...... my favorite distro at that time was "Crunchbang." Super clean and fast.... 🕊️

@@PineappleForFun No bro, I'm sure I run Knoppix on my Altair in late 70's 🙄🙄

One thing most Linux distros seem to have lacked even then was a GUI for network configuration (just basic TCP/IP settings). I tried two I think, SuSe and a weird beast called DLD (Deutsche Linux-Distribution, a Linux distro specifically for the German-speaking market) and gave up connecting them to the internet. Ten years later I was a lot more successful with Ubuntu, that only required some shell fiddling to get a Brother network printer driver installed, everything else was very intuitive. Hadn't I needed to use an office suite and decided that for the time being MS Office was definitely the least of all evils in this field I might have swapped to Linux.

this was well into the mid 00's as many modems did not work well, or at all with Linux, as many parts of the US had yet to move past dial-up, and Linspire was great for selling a low cost computer that had a working 56K modem. I had one as a stop gap computer in late 05 after my gateway just became too old to keep up and having after gotten out of bad relationship leaving me a bit broke, and having just started a new job. So used it for a couple of years just fine on dial-up till I could get something better, and my town finally got cable internet in very late 07.

Right! See how far back he can go that he could compile eduke32 albeit and old version and then he could actually run Duke3D! It would defeat the user-friendly part, but at least it'd run lol.

As opposed to seeing the ever so slow progression of ReactOS

@@SenileOtaku OMG, it's painful. LOL

@@SenileOtaku I am pretty sure react os has no new development done now. Any and all useful commits have been gone for a while now.

The power of money and company investment. As soon as valve started working on proton wine became as good as it is now

Most people just click a browser icon and go just to google or facebook anyway 😅😅

Is Maximum PC still around? I remember seeing their magazines in-store years ago but I completely forgot about them until recently.

That is a crazy thing to witness. What's always seemed goofy to me is RU-vid HAVING the 144p-480p versions of videos, having the code to provide the lower quality version to older systems, and just choosing not to. I know for a fact it would work too because I've watched RU-vid on an eMac using some convoluted method that made it use QuickTime or Media Player Classic

I've got PCs with browsers 2 years out of date since I haven't turned them on for a while, they already run into JS issues. This stuff is annoying.

@@Helladamnleet I remember the first time i watched youtube on a phone of my own. It was a Nokia E72, and RU-vid could just barely run on it at 144p.

Thanx for the reminder. I was trying to think where my disk came from and that was it..

There are still OS that use KDE. I use a version of KDE Plasma on my Raspberry pi 4. 👍

@@rmcdudmk212 There are, but KDE Plasma's UI seems to be fairly different from classic KDE's from what I've seen of it.

@@R0ck4x3 I get that. My point was only that it's legacy is still kicking. 👍

@@rmcdudmk212 fair enough xp

"Modern Linspire" lol they've been out of business since... hang on. (goes and does a thing) ...Holy cow, they're still around! And still clinging to their faux-Windows roots, it seems; it ships with Edge out of the box now. But not KDE. Why on earth would a distro designed to cater to Windows users not be running KDE anymore???

@0x0fffff Nope, it's GNOME. Default MacOS-style layout and all.

Walmart pushed these machines big time for a few years well into their early Linspire phase, and I bought one in late 2005 as I was somewhat broke, needed a PC for work, so I took what money I had, and borrow some from my aunt, and it was a solid computer for the time even coming with a working 56K modem which as a big deal as lots of modems at the time did not work on Linux, and my small town would not get better internet for a few years.

I'm sure LGR would love to borrow one for a video.

Yeah, in the year 2023 I still cannot get some very basics in Linux usability that Windows has had forever. I really want to love Linux but kinda hate it as much as Windows, in part for same reasons in part for other reasons.

@@Dowlphin yeah I agree, the biggest issue that Linux has is the reliance on text files for a lot of config, with little GUI implementation, and those that do are shoddy or no longer maintained. The moment that a distro produces a complete management and configuration suite as well as focusing on getting the basics right instead of jumping straight into the deep end, will be the moment that Linux becomes more widely accepted. I mean seriously how hard is it to make a DE that is 1:1 feature parity with windows? It’s not like they’ve made any serious effort to innovate for a few decades.

@@Underestimated37 Exactly! So refreshing to see someone else taking issue with that, too. Another big example would be the lack of drag-and-drop for the start menu. Or how Dolphin offers various sorting methods but dodges around an option the way Windows Explorer does it. Or its whole way of folder navigation.

@@Dowlphin it’s frustrating because I can’t put a client on it as an alternate OS, because there’s a huge learning curve, otherwise these days with exception of office there’s no difference between software uses.