I worked at Lindows/Linspire so below is obviously biased.
> The desktop was under-powered
It was the first sub $200 PC, what did you expect? The PC actually sold very well.
> their software manager lacked too many apps and... it still suffered from dependency hell - leading to breakage.
It was Debian under the hood and later Ubuntu and had every package in respective apt repo. It made available every major GUI based desktop app at the time via a graphical installer as the target user had no clue what CLI was nor “apt-get”. This turned a lot of existing Linux users off but they (you) were never the target market.
Linspire also made huge strides in specifically addressing dependencies including developing a package manager called Opium (https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~lerner/papers/opium.pdf). A number of these features went on to be folded directly into apt itself.
> Linspire's attempt at low-cost did Linux a lot of harm.
To the target market/user Linspire did far more good than harm. To the community, Linspire/Lindows gave back a ton. This included:
- Financial supporter to Wine
- Financial supporter to ResierFS (far ahead of any filesystem at the time… horrible tragedy what happened with his wife Nina)
- Financial supporter to Debian (RIP Ian)
- Financial supporter to Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird (ex. inline spell checking was first found in Linspire)
- Funded gaps in applications such as NVU HTML editor
- First sub $200 PC in retail store
- First commercial “app store” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNR_(software))
- Was sued for Microsoft for trademark infringement and walked away with $20 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com,_Inc.)
- Fastest Linux installer at the time by wide margin
- Early adopter of Haskell
- First distro to use Bittorrent for distribution
- Funded Desktop Linux Summit
- Funded initiative to translate major apps into 50+ languages
All told Linspire put millions per year back into the community. One can argue business model to death but over 10 years of hindsight now show that consumers simply had no appetite for commercial desktop Linux (nor do they still).
Where Linspire really fell on its face was running as root. There could have been much more elegant solutions to solve this but decision was solely outside of engineering.
Signed up. Added a few accounts. Tried adding a custom app and it wanted me to subscribe for $29 per month.
I would happily pay for a service like this but not $300+ per year. As is, there is a free account or one targeted at businesses. What about an upgraded single user tier in the $50 per year range?
Also, as others stated, permissions on Github, Dropbox, etc. seem excessive.
- Their performance claims are incredibly biased. Amazon S3 has far better write performance than their claims.
- They claim 100% S3 compatibility but it fails a large number of API calls using Ceph’s s3-test. I didn’t dig into this too far but they do claim “No need to change your S3-compatible application” so changing my endpoint + credentials should have worked. To their credit - PUT, GET and DELETE did work but that is only 3 of 100’s of API’s.
- Their durability claims are highly suspect. I would want to see a white paper breaking this down.
- Their first round was debt financing.
Why this business model does’t work...
Most people don’t use S3 alone. S3 is a source for other AWS services. That being said, Wasabi becomes a more expensive option as you have a 4 cent egress fee to access data from the rest of your AWS infrastructure. The only place Wasabi becomes cheaper is for those using S3 direct/alone which is a very small subset of S3 usage. AWS is very open about this in white papers, conferences, tech talks, etc.
Wasabi is an economy at scale play that cast way too far a net. There is opportunity in specific vertical markets to sell a solution (object paired with compute) but a pure S3 endpoint will never take substantial marketshare away from AWS.
Great decision! I have done the same and not looked back.
The first few years are the worst. You’ll have times when you are worried and want to throw in the towel or just plain overwhelmed. Unless you are destitute and need the money from a full time job - push through this! The freedom on the other side is worth the sacrifice.
- Automate everything you can. Billing, business related payments, etc. Give yourself the option to skip a day or two and not think about it.
- Get a good CPA! Anything you need for the “business” is now a write off. The comments that you'll pay more in taxes are total BS. As an unmarried, childless and non home owning CA resident I lost over 42% of my income to taxes working for someone else. I now have an effective rate of ~25% when you take into account all the write offs.
- Once you establish yourself you can be more selective in not taking clients that tie you to a specific physical location. Accommodating timezones from the other side of the planet is far less demanding when you are doing it barefoot on the beach.
I played the startup game for a long time. I had some mild success but over same timeframe I would have made far more doing my own thing earlier. I now make substantially more than my fancy titled tech job. More so, I work far less and wouldn’t give up my free time to make more. I choose when I work, how I work and to some degree the type of work.
Last thing, don’t listen to the people who tell you it can’t be done or not worth it. I have witnessed a lot of people attempt this and fail with the number one reason by a large margin being succumbing to the doubt instilled by others. Worse, its instilled by people with no experience in doing it themselves or in some cases jealousy. Yes, it will be hard in the near term. Yes, you will have many failures along the way. Shake yourself off and start over. Find other like minded people to learn from.
> The desktop was under-powered
It was the first sub $200 PC, what did you expect? The PC actually sold very well.
> their software manager lacked too many apps and... it still suffered from dependency hell - leading to breakage.
It was Debian under the hood and later Ubuntu and had every package in respective apt repo. It made available every major GUI based desktop app at the time via a graphical installer as the target user had no clue what CLI was nor “apt-get”. This turned a lot of existing Linux users off but they (you) were never the target market.
Linspire also made huge strides in specifically addressing dependencies including developing a package manager called Opium (https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~lerner/papers/opium.pdf). A number of these features went on to be folded directly into apt itself.
> Linspire's attempt at low-cost did Linux a lot of harm.
To the target market/user Linspire did far more good than harm. To the community, Linspire/Lindows gave back a ton. This included:
All told Linspire put millions per year back into the community. One can argue business model to death but over 10 years of hindsight now show that consumers simply had no appetite for commercial desktop Linux (nor do they still).
Where Linspire really fell on its face was running as root. There could have been much more elegant solutions to solve this but decision was solely outside of engineering.