FreeSpire
Be advised this post is for the layman. No technobable here. If you want technobable and to learn more about FreeSpire click here to visit the FreeSpire website.
I have been saying that Linux is not yet ready for the desktop, mostly because of driver problems, and the ugly fonts—especially when browsing.
FreeSpire has changed my mine. Although FreeSpire will be available in two versions—one with proprietary drivers, the other without. I will always choose the one with the close proprietary drivers. Who wouldn't? Well…. only an open source zealot, that's who. But as for the rest of us, the ones who just want our operating system to just work with our hardware now, this is a god-send!
I downloaded FreeSpire Beta 2 a few days ago and installed it. To my surprise it worked even better than Linspire 4.5 (the Linspire version I played with a year ago). It detected my nVidia card, my network card, my… what am I repeating so much for, it recognized everything! (except my NTFS partition, it was locked, maybe because it's beta?), it even detected my network and automatically set itself up as DHCP and grabbed an IP from my router. I was cruising the Internet with ease.
This is what I have been saying all along, as soon as Linux can be easy to install and manage, as we can with Windows, then I can say, from my point of view, Linux is ready for the desktop.
Well… Linux is ready for the desktop!
Go try out FreeSpire, but be warned, it is still in the beta stage.