Linspire or Xandros?

[CougTek]

With the insane Vista hardware requirements and the increasing difficulty of hacking a copy of Windows (by users, of course), our store has to offer a cheap alternative to the OS of the Evil Empire.

Both cost 50U$ per license. I have a Linspire Five-O iso that I've never burned and used. I've never tried Xandros. I like Kubuntu, but it may be too big a pill to swallow for most users. Although the perspective of not having to worry about spywares and virus may be a nice incencitive. Kubuntu won't let user run Windows applications as easily as both the others though. Why run Windows applications? Because popular tax reporting softwares aren't compatible with Linux. Because OpenOffice is apparently very hard to learn for an MS Office user. Ditto for Thunderbird and Firefox vs Outlook and IE. Is there a version of Acomba for Linux? Games, did I mention games? Etc, etc, etc.

Also, is there something else than Wine for using Winblows apps under Linux? Wine doesn't come with Kubuntu and I don't see it among the packages I can add and install. I guess I'll have to install it the hard manual way. I've never used it and I'm sure it's complicated.

So, Xandros or Linspire?

 

[Sol]

Wine should be listed in Synaptic but if not "sudo apt-get wine" should install it no problems.
You should also be able to get winetools (I'm not entirely sure of the package name for that since my Debian install doesn't have it but I know it's in Ubuntu, and hence in Kubuntu). That should help to install a few common applications like Office and IE (Because it's required by a lot of other programs). Versions of office newer than 2000 won't be fully supported so if you can find some old licences for that you would be well served.
Ubuntu is easily the fastest growing linux distro arround today, it seems like it's become the firefox of linux so for future support and compatability I'd bet on it (or Kubuntu obviously) before I went with Xandros or Linspire. But that said if Xandros and Linspire offer another phone number (other than yours) for people to call when they have issues then I guess it's worth it.

 

[Sol]

Or "sudo apt-get install wine" rather...

 

[CougTek]

Thanks for the reply. I'll try sudo apt-get install wine. Then all I'll have to do is figure out how this thing works.

 

[Sol]

Things you need to know about apt;

"apt-get update" before you do anything to get your package lists up to date.
"apt-cache search whatever" to search for packages about whatever.
"apt-get install packagename" to install the package.
"apt-get upgrade" to upgrade to the latest version of all your installed packages.

For K/Ubuntu sudo them all obviously. Or you can look through the package lists in Synaptic, but apt is usually much quicker...

 

[Mercutio]

If apt is something you really want, you can bolt it on to just about any major distro. My SuSE machines have apt repositories set up.

I've only seen Linspire (on a genuine Walmart PC, naturally), but it didn't look particularly different from any other Linux system. So I'm not entirely sure what the appeal is.

wine is kind of a PITA to deal with. I've gotten Word and IE to work pretty easily with winetool. The $50 Crossover Office is even more useful for getting Windows apps to work, but only a narrow range of them (Office, Quickbooks, end of list). However, they do genuinely work better than the ones supported by wine at the moment.
Crossover Office comes with the for-pay version of SuSe 10.