Thursday, June 01, 2006

The road to Linspire 6.0

Freespire has announced a development roadmap leading towards version 1.0. The distribution's first beta is scheduled to be released on 1 August 2006, with the final product following one month later. The release of Freespire 1.1 will be followed by Linspire 6.0, the company's commercial product, also due in the 4th quarter of 2006. For Linux to begin to make serious desktop market share in the US it is going to have to be at least as convenient as Microsoft's stuff. The average user is not going to want to go to the forums and search for an answer on how to get their media player to work with what format file they are trying to view or listen to. Lets face facts people, most users out there don't want to spend all their spare time tweaking their computer. I'm sure most don't mind installing the apps they want, but codecs and players are necessary to enjoy the internet. MP3 support, RealPlayer, Acrobat, online streaming videos from places , Flash, wireless and multimedia etc all vary in difficulty of installation. The average user need these things to work out of the box. For simple usability “out of the box” nobody gets it like Linspire. I have hope that Linspire 6.0 will be a early October release. It will give the OEM's like Koobox a chance at new pre-installed Linux base systems for Xmas.

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