Today I received news from a media contact of mine that Linspire has been purchased by Xandros, the company best known for Linux on the ASUS Eee. While this may be sad news for some, I do not think the ripples are going to be felt by anyone in the Linux community for a variety of reasons I am not going to get into.

A blast from Pirillo’s past.

Lockergnome’s own founder is seen in the video above talking about the Linspire (then Lindows) notebook that was really gaining a lot of press at the time. Back in those days, the Linux landscape was so very different and there was no question that Linspire was a serious player.

Linspire the way they were.

For me, my first experience with Linspire comes from their release of version 4.5, best highlighted in this Flash video. Yes, seriously doubt Linspire is even aware this video still exists on their servers - good thing my bookmarks are quite old as is my memory of their product.

While the video was fun and did express what Linspire was providing at the time, it was not perhaps as “professional” as some users might have liked. Speaking for myself, I was always fond of it because it was just so off-the-wall.

Linspire 5.0 - so very close at the time of release.

As you can see from this Flash video, the approach taken by Linspire was a bit more feature oriented and less about the silliness of videos past. Featuring really great items such as an anti-virus for Windows partitions and SurfSafe content filtering for the kids, this was by far their best release to date.

Here is where things get sticky. With the exception of issues with the JACK sound server, this was and in my opinion, still is the best release to date. Other issues I struggled with at the time included a lack of Bluetooth support and an up to date hardware compatibility list.

Now these days I realize how silly this must seem. Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS among others have made much of this stuff a thing of the past. But at this time, the options for newbies were generally Xandros, Linspire and Simply Mepis. They key again at this time was a Debian Linux base. This changed for two of these three companies when they opted to go with Ubuntu.

Linspire 6.0

Simply Mepis took a quick dip into the Ubuntu waters and soon went back to the Debian pool due to the ongoing issues with stability. Linspire on the other hand, opted to make Ubuntu the base of their Freespire/Linspire releases. This could certainly be fine by itself with the exception of one very real issue. I honestly never really got the benefit of the new release over the older one? Again, I am going to tread lightly here as not to offend anyone, but Linspire 6 was really not giving the user anything that they did not already have from the end user’s perspective.

And today, Linspire is no longer a stand alone company. If this works out for Linspire, then I am thrilled for them. But I am always reluctant to accept change in the constants in my life. And I will be honest, Linspire is something I have been watching and participating with since the beginning. So this is going to be really weird for me.

My past suggestion to Linspire was to make support services available to existing distros. Perhaps this is what is going to end up happening after all. It should be interesting if nothing else.