Linspire Does Away with Annual Fee for "Click 'N Run" Linux Service

Linspire, developer of the commercial desktop Linux operating system of the same name and Freespire, the free community desktop Linux operating system, announced the immediate change in pricing for its popular CNR ("Click 'N Run") Service from an annual subscription fee based offering to a completely free service.

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Freespire 1.0

I recently sat down with Freespire 1.0.  I found that it had some promise but still has major problems.  It uses an old version of KDE and gnome is difficult to install. (A user has to load different repositories to get it to work)  The beauty of Freespire is that it incorporates both open source and proprietary.  It is the only time I've been able to install a Linux distribution and have my wireless working without ndiswrapper.  It also comes with a full verity of media codecs which makes it easy to watch content on my laptop. 

It also has other problems besides the gnome install. It boots to slow in my opinion.  I tested it with windows and Ubuntu.  Both windows and Ubuntu booted much faster on my AMD 64 laptop.  At this current time I would not recommend Freespire over Ubuntu to new Linux users but I believe moving forward Freespire could become a very good new Linux user distro.

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