Lindows, the weird Walmart Linux from 2002!

[@PixelatedH2O]

Sad it was never sold at Michaelsoft Binbows in Japan

[@simplyalonso]

wasn't michaelsoft bimbows a hardware store?

[@MarkusMaal]

​@@simplyalonsoand a repair shop

[@charliesretrocomputing]

Haha I forgot about that place!

[@der.Schtefan]

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

[@charliesretrocomputing]

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

[@BrianMoore-uk6js]

„Everything runs as root“ That’s what I call compatibility, they even copied the security features of Windows.

[@paradoxmo]

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.

[@klementineQt]

@@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.

[@paradoxmo]

@@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.

[@finnisnotafish]

@@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

[@frechjo]

@@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]

[@the_beefy1986]

I bought a Walmart PC running Lindows! I was already a Linux user by that point, so it was quickly replaced by a more standard distro (probably Mandrake at that stage of my life). It was a fairly standard set of micro ATX case with stripped down MSI mobo and AMD Duron 850 Mhz CPU. Pretty good value if I remember.

[@russellzauner]

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.

[@SenileOtaku]

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.

[@johnalbert2102]

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.

[@the_beefy1986]

@@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. :)

[@_sabot]

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

[@ActionGamerAaron]

5:12 It seems Lindows also tried to replicate the security issues Windows had at the time too 😁

[@Ragnar8504]

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.

[@nirui.o]

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

[@Ragnar8504]

@@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.

[@jickjackyou]

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).

[@petersuozzo1227]

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

[@H4lminator]

I had a Duron 1,4 ghz at one time. I still remember my friends being very surprised because their CPU’s were at minimum double the price and not much more powerful. The Duron was a very powerful budget cpu at the time 😃

[@ZaCaptain1229]

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

[@adey88splace]

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

[@KomradeMikhail]

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.

[@Minty1337]

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

[@adamlipsky8010]

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

[@WLivi]

I'm not at all surprised Mega Race and Duke 3D failed - I'm pretty sure they run under DOS; they're not Windows executables.

[@BloodySwede]

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

[@HamguyBacon]

why couldn't they use freedos

[@ericnear4273]

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

[@KyleMahaney]

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

[@RowanHawkins]

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)

[@JoshColletta]

Ah, this takes me back! After using WinLinux 2000 for a while, I moved to Lindows on an HP Pavilion that had come with Windows 98SE pre-installed because, at the time, Lindows was the easiest Linux distro to install in a dual-boot configuration. My father would have gone berserk if I had managed to brick the family computer, even if I knew how to fix it, so I wanted the quickest and easist way that carried as little risk as possible. Lindows never quite managed to do what it claimed -- because Wine was still VERY young back then. But the cool thing is that Lindows DID contribute quite a bit to Wine, both in code and just in visibility to the general public. Back then, everybody "knew" that Linux was its own thing, it couldn't run Windows programs, and Windows couldn't run Linux programs. Today, neither of those statements are true. and Lindows played a not insignificant part in helping to make that happen.

[@jacquelineliu2641]

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

[@JoshColletta]

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

[@CheapMobileGeek]

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

[@GoogleDoesEvil]

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.

[@drewzero1]

To be fair, that was pretty similar to my experience trying to install games on Windows at the time. Try to run and nothing happens, or get an unhelpful error message. In hindsight I probably needed a graphics card or better specs, but I had no idea at the time.

[@glenbush2008]

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 😢

[@penfold7800]

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.

[@lance862]

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.

[@drewzero1]

@@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.

[@JohnMatthew1]

I was a Lindows indsider, a great bunch of people and very smart engineers.

[@freesiu]

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

[@jaybrooks1098]

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

[@JohnMatthew1]

@@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.

[@Dratchev241]

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.

[@mozzjones6943]

@@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.

[@kumarp3074]

Another fun fact about Lindows was that it was one the only distros that could legally play back commercial DVD movies. The Lindows DVD player was " a fully-licensed decoder that allows commercial DVDs to be played easily and flawlessly on LindowsOS computers." A lot of consumers that purchased these machines though just wound up installing Windows on them.

[@airspeedmph]

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

[@TekTherapy]

Totally forgot about Lindows! What a blast of the past!! Thx for the great Video Sean!

[@KomradeMikhail]

The biggest problem with 1990's linux adoption was getting teh internets working... Modem drivers, kernel modules, recompiling, PPP setup... This was beyond most Win95 w/ AOL users. By 2002, a Walmart Lindows prebuilt with preconfigured Ethernet card for Cable/DSL broadband, would have been much less hassle.

[@Ragnar8504]

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.

[@CommodoreFan64]

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.

[@lemagreengreen]

Well this tickled a few long dormant neurons, had totally forgotten about Lindows! Having messed around with desktop Linux and WINE back then I now realize just what a huge customer service nightmare these PC's must have brought upon Walmart 😂 I love Linux but this was never going to work out well back then unless people did nothing but use the included applications.

[@Tall_Order]

I remember when KDE used to look like that. In the early to mid 2000s I kept CDs with Knoppix on them for utility purpose, back when I used to repair computers for people. I kept it around for debugging thins. It was a simple small OS, fitting for my needs. It helped me crack windows passwords for people who forgot theirs.

[@PineappleForFun]

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

[@Tall_Order]

@@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

[@Dratchev241]

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

[@stable-shadow]

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

[@tziuriky86]

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

[@schmup]

Lindows was the first version of Linux I ever saw. My dad bought a pc that came with it from Frys Electronics (I think?) and the potato guy game brought back some memories lol

[@cameronbosch1213]

Ah Frys, the computer company that slowly died in the 2010s before being pushed over the edge in 2020...

[@Kwpolska]

The certificate errors in Netscape mention the system clock is set to 2018, it could probably work without those warnings if the clock was set correctly.

[@brentsummers7377]

The judge probably got it right because other pc makers including Amstrad were talking about 'windows' in their documentation way back in the mid 1980s.

[@livefreeprintguns]

I was always a Slackware guy (started on 3.1 back in 1996) but I have to say I was pretty stoked when I was able to buy a boxed copy of Debian Linux at Best Buy. In fact I immediately put the Debian bumper sticker on my car, right next to my straightedge sticker lol... those were the days.

[@anon_y_mousse]

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

[@livefreeprintguns]

@@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!

[@ScarfaceTHPS]

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

[@livefreeprintguns]

@@ScarfaceTHPS It was the 90's man. 😅

[@brydon10]

I'd love to see some more of this linux system. Updating it and installing some linux goodies sounds fun.

[@AndyAKratz]

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.

[@XeonProductions]

It's kinda sad how closed off the internet has become to old devices. If you don't run into TLS/SSL errors, the modern JavaScript will surely stop you. I tried an experiment earlier this year upgrading a 2008 version of Ubuntu to the most recent version in-place and was running into SSL errors within the package manager.

[@Helladamnleet]

That is a crazy thing to witness. What's always seemed goofy to me is KZbin 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 KZbin on an eMac using some convoluted method that made it use QuickTime or Media Player Classic

[@glossymouse7712]

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.

[@mfbfreak]

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

[@zzco]

lmao, "IT'S THE YEAR OF DESKTOP LINUX"™

[@gaathastory]

I had installed Lindows and later Linspire using the DVD R+W in early 2003 or 4. And Till mid 2006, I had a Sony Trinitron monitor, it was big, bulky and heavy...but was common for the era (21 or 22 inches?) This video brings back a lot of fond memories.

[@Fay7666]

Considering the compatibility and experience that most normal users would've had, it is very fitting that the name is just transforming a W into an L.

[@tziuriky86]

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

[@stevethepocket]

The part about the lawsuit is an important lesson, by the way. We tend to cynically assume that if a bunch of nobodies tangle with a huge corporation in court, they're going to lose whether they're right or wrong. And _that's exactly what those corporations want you to think._ It's so much easier to cow them into giving up immediately and settling out of court. Even when they _do_ win, the public tends not to find out about it-I'm pretty sure the word on the street when they changed the name to Linspire was that they had lost the suit or settled out of court and one of the terms was having to change it. Lindows ended up getting to have it both ways. They got the popularity boost that came from having the gimmicky name, and then from getting sued, and _then_ they were in a position to negotiate for more money than most Linux development teams could dream of. That $20 million might have been the biggest single "investment" any open source project had ever received all at once like that; I assume most of it was sunk into improving WINE. We might not have the Steam Deck today if not for that. Fortune really does favor the bold sometimes.

[@TheRetroMess]

I almost think we need a yearly update on where WINE is as a concept after looking at where it was when this came out and then where it is with the SteamDeck because I feel it's kind of impossible to conceptualize all the things that use it now, all the specialized applications of it. At the very least it'd be slightly interesting to see a mini documentary on WINE. The forums, the drama, the pathos, the highs, the lows (OKAY, I'm being hyperbolic). But, y'know? I just remember using it in it's pre-version 1 form (or maybe that was MAME... The acronyms all blend together in memory) and how hacky that was.

[@SenileOtaku]

As opposed to seeing the ever so slow progression of ReactOS

[@TheRetroMess]

@@SenileOtaku OMG, it's painful. LOL

[@theSoberSobber]

@@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.

[@idk-sy3iu]

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

[@LuckyPower__]

“the Walmart flirtation with consumer Linux didn’t stop at Lindows: I present - the Lackintosh!”

[@stefandriesner5026]

Lindows/Linspire horrified anyone already familiar with Linux: by *default* you ran as root. It may no longer be true of modern Linspire, but any distro that would even consider such a default dropped very quickly off my radar.

[@stevethepocket]

"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???

[@stevethepocket]

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

[@patchso]

Never knew it was you who created FrogFind. Excellent job! I use this on Classic Amiga OS3.1. Works a treat.

[@skyde72]

That's really intersting! Always a good day when you upload!

[@orektez]

i still have a few lindows and linspire discs though they're horribly disc-rotted at this point, i keep them in a binder with my other doomed cdroms, aol, netscape, and other information super highway type-discs.

[@mattp3437]

Microcenter also offered Lindows on their PowerSpec private label pc’s. They also sold the physical copy for around $50. I remember installing the trial version and being impressed that my Wi-Fi worked and I didn’t break the OS in the first 15 min. That was way farther than I got dabbling around with other Linux distros. I was really tempted to buy Lindows given the hefty price tag for real Windows.

[@cameronbosch1213]

Seriously!? They sold Linux Too bad the Micro Center near me was originally a Circuit City until CC closed in 2009. Then Micro Center took it over but kept much of the Linux-based POS systems from CC. Sadly, I wish we'd see more competitive Linux first hardware, given the Microsoft Copilot key trash on the keyboard (usually instead of the right Control key that I always use), the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite Windows laptops seemingly not having Secure Boot easily disableable (sounds like antitrust needs to step in), Windows 11 being worse than Windows ME in many ways (and that's VERY impressive) and now Valve working on Linux and Wine after Windows 8 released and spooked Valve. Most of the current hardware is not great in terms of screens, build quality, or price... We need more companies like Framework and System76.

[@RBMK1500]

Haha, thank you to put SUSE in your video again and trying again on pronouncing it. The last try was pretty close 👍👍 - on your way to be the top-tier pronouncer! 🎉

[@Fr0stM00n]

Thank you for making this video! I actually still have an original Lindows tower but swapped to Windows very soon after buying it from Tiger Direct (I think that is where I bought it from!) The OS was just too unstable and sadly, upon reinstall attempts, i get to a prompt to enter a password that was never provided to me! :( if I recall, the installer disc was a generic unbranded CDr with a sticker with Lindows written with a sharpie 😂 I know it's still around somewhere!

[@Jelly2003]

Thanks for that trip down memory lane, I remember getting Lindows from the cover disc from APC magazine here in Australia. Would have been fun to see you try to install some Windows productivity such as Office 97, that’s probably more in line with what the OS was meant for.

[@paulwarner5395]

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

[@Underestimated37]

I remember lindows! It was a great introduction to Linux, it had all the looks of windows at the time, and was simple to use. It was sad they weren’t ever really successful, as they could’ve been a good way to get new people into the system. The version I used was much newer than what you had though, they’d managed to replicate the XP start button by then

[@Dowlphin]

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.

[@Underestimated37]

@@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.

[@Dowlphin]

@@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.

[@Underestimated37]

@@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.

[@Ragnar8504]

Potato Guy reminds me a lot of Thinkin' Things, the "build your own bird" module. That did have more functionality because there was a mode that instructed you to design a specific bird from the prompts the software gave you, basically teaching children to follow verbal instructions and turn them into visuals. The whole thing was definitely crazy enough to be fun even for children quite a few years older than the target group.

[@TimEssDub]

I remember Maximum PC magazine covering this around that time. They popped open a tower and found a Mini-ITX board inside.

[@JJFlores197]

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

[@RicardoRamosRetrocomputacao]

In the past, I didn't really trust this Ugreen sponsor because it was a new/unknown brand, but I must say that it was the first cable that lasted so long in my use. I bought a P2 male and female extension cable to use on my headphone, my cables didn't last more than 1 year, especially because the chair ran over the wire. This one is already 3 years old and is still perfect, the cover hasn't ripped exposing the internal cables, and it hasn't become stiff or dry either (it usually happens because I live in Brazil and it's very hot here). The only criticism I have is that the gold-plated connector had green oxidation, It doesn't cause bad contact, but it looks ugly.

[@johnknight9150]

I remember this very well. The interesting part is that this might actually be viable now. If you look at Proton's compatibility figures for the Top 1000 titles (the most reliable overall metric), the Platinum and Gold rated titles (i.e. it basically just runs straight away) are now close to 80%. If you add Silver titles (meaning it runs, but it's buggy), it's almost 90%. Those numbers alone are getting dangerously close to the kind of backwards compatibility Microsoft has been able to offer when switching architectures, and that doesn't even include games with anti-cheat lockout, which would otherwise add a substantial number.

[@drygnfyre]

And to comment on Walmart initially selling their computers with no OS installed: I recall Microsoft at one point was trying to lobby Congress to pass a law making it illegal to sell computers without an operating system installed. I don't think anything came of it, but now I understand the context of why they tried.

[@Drbeckerproductions]

Thank you for not being an exclusive Mac user. It's always great to appreciate everything, and I'm kind of tired of seeing retro channels only stick to one type of computer.

[@onewheelpeelproductions470]

I never knew about the Walmart part, my Lindows machines came from Fry's back in the day. I foolishly assumed it was a Fry's exclusive. I still have a couple of those machines in my collection.

[@CommodoreFan64]

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.

[@andrewschultz77]

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

[@popcorn782]

I used it before and during the Lindows to Linspire change. It ran great at the time and was a great experience!

[@heizelmejia5359]

I just remember my early experience with Linux in the 2000s...

[@csolisr]

Checking out, not only does Linspire still exist somehow, it even got a cost-free fork named Freespire. Which eventually ended up switching to XFCE as its main window manager by the way.

[@Kewrock]

So only a year later in 2003 I bought my first computer. An eMachines with WinXP, an AMD Athlon2400 chip, 120gb HHD, 1GB RAM, DVD-RW AND! a second DVDrom, a 15" CRT, a Lexmark all-in-one printer/scanner, stereo speakers, KB and mouse. It was a BestBuy bundle under $400. It seems in just one year later, affordability and technical specs made huge advancements. It makes that Walmart machine looks like something from the late 80s-early 90s.

[@maliciousbugman]

>Lindows has Potato Guy Guess we gotta pack it up, PC gaming bros... we'll never have gaming THIS good.

[@mar4kl]

Cool! Back in the day, I used to wonder about Lindows' claim to run Windows software. I never really did get a definitive answer. I didn't expect full compatibility or that it would run desktop publishing software or even programmable RDMS, but it would have been interesting to see it tested with off-the-shelf Microsoft Office 97 or a later version. I see that your WalMart PC came with Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint viewers, and it would be fun to know after all these years if those are the original viewers running in Windows emulation, ports of those viewers to Linux, or viewers specially written for Lindows.

[@tziuriky86]

In 1999 / early 2000's I was capable of running a few Windows binaries on Linux. Microsoft Encarta run perfectly for example 😁😁 But I was able to run also other random stuff - even when not necessary - such as Acrobat Reader for Windows (despite there was a Linux version too). Loads of Windows 98 exes run just fine, like Paint, Wordpad, Notepad etc. 😊😊 I did also try one of the viewers back then (I believe the word viewer, which I had found on a Visual Basic CD-ROM) and it did run 😊😊 (At the time we had the ancestor of LibreOffice, called StarOffice, still a Sun Microsystems software, before they were bought by Oracle, the other alternative was AbiWord) but it would not always open word files correctly, so the viewer came in handy 😊😊 #nostalgia

[@mar4kl]

@@tziuriky86, wow, thanks! It's not often that my curiosity about something that was around or happened 20+ years ago gets satisfied.

[@Lampe2020]

9:13 That's because the lindows domain (which was Lindows's home page at the time) now redirects to that.

[@VladAndreis]

Oh maaaaan, I remember playing around with some version of Lindows back when I was in high school! I haven't thought of it since! Thanks for this video!

[@techguy651]

Great job bringing that back! My brother bought one of these budget PCs when we were in high school. Would love to see an attempt to upgrade its software to something more modern.

[@emulatorretro]

I bought one of these, but the case looked different. btw Lindows was just partnered with Lindows and not owned by Walmart mart. I worked on it all the way through college and wrote many a term paper on that thing.

[@aber-music]

I loved it, Lindows was the start, the feeling was that is the first Linux that works and it was easy to install new software. I used it for Testing and it worked quite well in the first time. Linspire comes and it was still fun but in the end I changed to mac. It was fun and it was for me the first linux that kind of works. Today I uses as a second computer a linux maschine and i really still love to see what is new and how far linux has come in time. Today the linux maschine can be a good computer in an office. I guess it was just in (US/English) no german. But here I can be wrong. FUN

[@annihilatorg]

I helped do repairs for one of the linux desktop selling companies, Linare. They were based in Bellevue, WA, right in the shadow of Microsoft. Very low quality hardware, but nice guys.

[@dionelr]

I remember seeing these being advertised and always wondered what became of them. The claim of “windows compatibility” was a bit suspect to me. I wonder how many might still be out there. 😅

[@GlitchedVision]

another interesting note about LinSpire, when the PS3 was released with alternative OS support, (before they murdered it anyways,) you could buy a conversion kit to allow you to install a customized version of LinSpire Linux that is easy to install and run on the ps3 hardware.

[@eduardoADSL]

These days I installed Mint Linux on an old netbook and managed to play Age of Empires 2 (the original, not the remaster) through wine, maybe that game cound work on Lindows...

[@utp216]

I remember this! Thank you for the memories! Great video!

[@perfectlyroundcircle]

Wow, you're the one who built frogfind? That's cool. Also, the concept of that PC was refreshing at that time, but as I kid I would have been so disappointed to find out it doesn't actually run most windows applications.

[@potmej1]

Megarace and Duke Nukem 3D were DOS games, so I'm not sure if those would run under Wine? You may need DOS emulator for those :)

[@kmitses]

I'm soooooo glad you made this video I always wanted to know more about windows !

[@MegaManNeo]

As a kid from Germany seeing Lindows on TV in the early 2000's which happened to be of the nerdy kind already back then, I always wanted to try Lindows myself and was very impressed despite having zero knowledge of Linux or what Linux even is at that time. I can't help it but operating systems always fascinated me, even as a kid. Funny how time changed and bringing something with the name Lindows today would potentially work software and hardware wise if things were that easy.

[@raphcap]

-Mom, I want Windows! -We already have Windows at home, Travis! The Windows at home:

[@robsku1]

When I switched to Linux, without having any experience (but I was very much a "hacker minded" coder and command line enthusiast, which was the basis for why I instantly fell in love with it), one option I was considering to try was Lindows - luckily I didn't, partially as I was warned by an online friend who was a Linux user, that AFAHK it might not be very good. I haven't ever tried it, but it's rather obvious that I haven't missed anything. Btw, Steam doesn't use Wine, but the product they have made is AFAIK a fork of Wine, so it's not the worst mistake you could make ;)

[@kjrehberg]

It was a really polished user interface. It was also one of the first, if not the first, Linux distribution with an App Store.

[@10MARC]

Nifty stuff. I suppose it was never meant for gaming, but for productivity programs. Using a machine like this and connecting it to the Internet is not inherently dangerous. Someone would have to be actively trying to get into that specific machine, and would still have to know your root password. And if they got in... What next? What would they do? Try and steal your non functional copy of "Megarace"? They could grab those awesome sound clips! "Hi, I'm Lance Boyle and people often ask me if I'm real"

[@earhornjones]

I worked at a company that did PC repairs when these came out. We immediately bought one out of sheer curiosity, and because they were absurdly cheap. I remember the build quality being quite bad. The case bonnet wasn't correctly aligned out of the box, so one of us took it off to install it properly, and we managed to accidentally seriously bend the cheap sheet metal to the point that we never got it back on. We never found a legitimate use case for Lindows itself, but we kept the PC on the bench for a couple of years with some other Linux distro on it to use as a test device. It was a complete heap, but you could ping stuff with it.

[@kbhasi]

(8:05) I just realised that they renamed Konqueror to "Browser" as part of simplifying KDE for their target audience. The single-user experience with the modified KDM seemed to be done primarily to allow for writing to the root file system from what I can tell watching this video.

[@mrtelevision8079]

Duke 3D is a DOS game, and the installer is a DOS installer as well. Obviously you can't expect WINE to work, maybe you could have installed DosBox for Linux and it would actually be able to run. Same for Megarace which is a DOS game! Driver was never going to work due to the 3D acceleration. All in all, it's too bad you chose those games, because it'd be interesting to see if some non-3D Windows games could actually run, like maybe Diablo or Doom 95...

[@iainlaurence]

it is so strange seeing the modern google website and an ad for tiktok on the literal walmart version of windows from 20+ years ago

[@paulmawhorter2713]

I remember playing with potato guy when I was a kid.

[@BlueBarnTech]

I so remember this. People use to argue with us when we tried to sell them a PC that they could buy these cheaper at Walmart. Hope it worked out for them.

[@chuckthetekkie]

I've seen Microcenter selling Lindows PCs at one point so it wasn't exclusive to Wal-Mart.

[@landroveraddict2457]

Back in the day we'd pronounce SUSE Linux Suzie.

[@alicesavage69420]

Was very surprised to see MegaRace, probably my favorite FMV game, show up here. The reason it immediately crashed is probably because it's a DOS game, not a Windows one. (Same with the Duke Nukem installer.)

[@csumme7]

I sold the same towers as the Microtel Walmart Lindows PCs back then. Couldn't compete as mine had 2000 and XP on them. Those things sold really well but the return of them was also really well because people who bought them couldn't load up their Windows programs on it.

[@brpadington]

My parents had a PC with Lindows on it back in the day. It ran all of their apps except we could never get quickbooks to work so they switched back. It was actually a good distro at first before they started selling gpl apps in the shop.

[@dereketnyre7156]

I used Lindows back in the day for a few months. Remember being pretty annoyed with it's lack of software compatability. I wanted to run Lotus Domino Designer on it and never did get it going. It would run Word and Excel but really slow. Getting printers configured was a nightmare. Believe I went to a version of Debian or Mandrake Linux after Lindows and had better go of things.

[@gyulalaszlo9268]

What is "Low" with the Stop sign in the installer, when installing Driver game? I saw that many times back in the day.

[@sevenfacedsin]

It’s now Linspire / Freespire. The original Lindows / Linspire went defunct but someone else revived it. Not the same anymore. Linspire was great.

[@T_Burd_75]

I remember when they changed to Linspire. I had installed it on an old computer I had sitting around. It ran quite well, and I was impressed with their Click-n-Run feature (CnR) which made installing apps from their software store a cinch. Remember gOS?

[@MegaFlorin111]

Ahh... the old KDE desktop, so many memories!

[@rmcdudmk212]

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

[@R0ck4x3]

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

[@rmcdudmk212]

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

[@R0ck4x3]

@@rmcdudmk212 fair enough xp

[@stonent]

Slight correction, Xerox PARC was the facility (Palo Alto Research Center) the computer was the Alto.

[@gaijinblow]

Geez a definitely blast from the past. I forgot what Lindows was until I saw the logo and remembered.

[@GDub83]

This is wild, I haven't seen or thought about this distro in years. I used it for a short while in the early 2000s when I had to replace a failed drive and didn't have a copy of windows lol.

[@borg5424]

uncontrollable laughter at that "nose" for Potato Guy

[@yueibm]

What a trip down memory lane!

[@ss11733]

the average consumer wasn't trying to game or watch KZbin at the time.. Microsoft word and excel, maybe some email... maybe reading online news... or using a calendar..

[@BRBTechTalk]

1:47 The mother boards in those machines was ridiculously small, with no extra slots to upgrade. I think they also suffered from bad caps. 11:09 Since I was and still am a Windows hater and was running Linux back then I was glad to see that Walmart was bold enough to try and pull that off. I bet the support desk had more calls than they could handle after a Walmart shopper took a computer home. I was also very happy when I heard the judge favoured Lindows vs Microsoft in the court case. Back then Microsoft was doing everything they could to try and kill Linux.

[@PineappleForFun]

Potato Guy wasnt Lindows, that was a built in thing of KDE of the era. Well, 'built in', it wasnt a part of the core os but it was one of the kde-games or kde-educational packages, one of those that you got with the kde-full pseudo package. I was a redhat user back in the day so it might have been packaged differently on other distros.

[@JamesRichardsPlays]

Man... early 2000's Linux desktop color and window schemes...nostalgia. This was when I started tinkering with Linux, learning more than Windows and MacOS X wasn't a thing yet. I miss those days sometimes. Sometimes.

[@MAGAMAN]

That CD player reminded me of the first CD player I bought. It used a cartridge that you put the CD in, then put that into the drive. Every time I would hit the eject button, it would launch the cartridge out of the drive onto my desk.

[@reeffeeder]

I like your chuckle everytime the CD drive falls apart

[@dunatyphon5416]

I'm quite certain that Lindows was it's own company. No actual corporate affiliation with Walmart.

[@edherdman9973]

It's good to see this video now that we're here in the future, in The Year of Desktop Linux!

[@drygnfyre]

I briefly used this OS, but after it was renamed to Linspire. Around 2005 or so. I remember it had a "Launch" button. It tried really hard to look like Windows XP. I never got my wireless cards to work so ultimately I couldn't really do much beyond just the preinstalled applications. I specifically remember a tutorial that was included making some bizarre claims, like desktop Linux had 25% market share (compared to desktop Windows?), and that Linspire would "run everything Windows can run." I had no idea that this OS started life as some kind of Walmart tie-in, though. I came across Linspire as just another online distro. This was also right before Ubuntu Linux got huge and arguably did desktop Linux "right."

[@mrmotofy]

I still have 1 machine I believe still has LindowsOS on it. Another same vintage with Redhat. Xandros was another really good one. That worked flawless with Windows networking out of the box. I believe that was another similar Microsoft buyout thing. Suddenly no more updates, no replies no support and faded into history.

[@stable-shadow]

Lindows was not exclusive to Walmart. it has a fairly solid bunch of applications and software, it worked fairly well....... It was functional..... Where Walmart came into this who knows but really has nothing to do with Lindows......

[@CMDRSweeper]

Updating it to newer Linux and seeing if you can get the old games like Duke and Driver would be interesting. Of course, you may have to give it a graphics card as well for that, but in theory it should work on that Duron.

[@kleinstarnull]

"Potato Guy" is actually an official KDE Project called KTuberling, still getting new releases to this very day.