Re:Of Course! (Score 1)

It may be a little late in the discussion to post this but.. I made fun of Linspire/Freespire as much as any other self respecting geek, but since they made CNR free and soon open source I gave it a shot on my Laptop (a newish Sony wide screen that I've never had preconfigured right straight out of installing) - and to my amazement everything worked.

• automount? Check. (Don't have an ipod but see next item.)
• MP3? Check.
• Sluggish filesystem? Nope. All the right things preloaded.
• Remembers system volumes between reboots? Double check. It remembers and successfully discovers and mounts new ones. (And doesn't blow up if one is removed.)
• Package manager? Double check. CNR for almost everything (with reviews, screenshots, ratings, who'd have thought?) Apt-get for if you want to get really advanced. Yep, they work together perfectly. Install with apt-get, uninstall with CNR or vice versa. (I was especially impressed with this.)
• Slow boot time? ... Equal with XP Pro that I run on the same laptop. All that hardware detection does come at a price though I'm sure it could be optimized. Software hibrinate worked fine on my laptop, however, which makes the bootup time much shorter.
• GUI? Freespire clearly went to a lot of work to make sure all their packages present a consistent, polished look and feel. Very slick and not very Windows or OSX (which I like).
• Overly complex system settings? Nope. Easy control panel like interface for most things, more advanced interfaces not far behind. And gee, I don't have to sudo in order to change the time, go figure..
• Laptop support? Mostly check. I've had trouble on my laptop with everything from its wide screen, to power management, to DMA, integrated wireless... list goes on. All that shocked me by just working with Freespire. Hardware suspend is still a little buggy though, my only complaint.
• Live-CD? There but I never looked at it.. so ? Install was under 10 minutes though!!

OK, shameless plug for my new Linux desktop of choice complete. If it supported Active Directory authentication for logging in out of the box like OpenSuSE 10+ it would be my only Linux desktop. Oh, and Linspire isn't nearly as good as the Freespire version as far as I can tell (log in as root? yuk), so be sure not to pay for it.. go figure.

(Also, I do tend to up the security of Freespire's defaults but a small price to pay.)