....well sorta. Linspire, a.k.a. Lindows, has gotten the seal of approval from a MSNBC news columnist. It seems this is what Linux should be. Do you think other Linux distros will be following the path? Please discuss.

Let me prefix this by saying I'm not a linux zealot, especially not the kind that things that paying for any software is wrong. I do however think that Linspire is a little bit pricey, I got the free developer edition about 4 months ago, and then to get most of the software installed nicely I had to use their Click-N-Run to buy software.

An apt based system with Synaptic has the same features but the software is free. It's not that all software has to be free, I've paid for a Cedega subscription (just to try it out, I still have a windows partition for if I need to go back to it) and I'd pay to support my favorite projects (Firefox, Gaim, JEdit, a lot of others). I know that you can modify Linspire to use Synaptic so that you don't have to use Click-N-Run, but it seems to me the type of user who knows how to do that would probably be using something more advanced than Linspire.

I think the latest releases (FC4, Ubuntu 5.04, the SuSE preview that came out recently) are almost as user-friendly as Linspire, but much better.

PS. I should say that it is no secret that I am not a big fan of Michael Robertson of Linspire/MP3.com fame, he seems to talk without knowing what he's talking about too often.

I agree largely with what you say, cozman, but we also have to consider the fact that people are stupid. If someone sees something that's entirely free versus something roughly equivalent that costs money, they're probably going to assume that the free version is bad. Thus, if someone has to pay for linux software, they might actually think it competes with Windows.

I'm not really that concerned about it, though. I like my Linux, but I don't really care if others use it or not. It would certainly be nice if there was more choice out there, but it's also not vital. One thing that a more or less one-OS world does is promote standards, and that at least is a good thing.