Before Ubuntu

Some of you will remember Linspire (Lindows) and Xandros. These were attempts to make Linux easy and break the Microsoft monopoly.They did not succeed because money talks and a dominant market position can be exploited. 

I bought Xandros -- absurdly it had activation, mimicking Windows -- and installed it on my computer. It wouldn't activate. The company, when I contacted them, worked with me to address the issue. They were glad of my patience and perseverance, and rewarded me with a Professional addition of Xandros, which I downloaded and installed. 

None of this was really in the spirit of Linux -- certainly it bore no relation to Stallman's vision -- but was rather an opportunistic space and time money-grab where some companies thought they could monetise Linux on the desktop. Xandros, I remember, had a sophisticated implementation of Wine called Crossover that allowed you to install Microsoft Office, only without Clippy. This was sold as a virtue. I believe Xandros later bought Linspire, who were subsequently paid by Microsoft to piss off, and piss off they duly did. 

I had tried a few "distros" by then: Suse -- not yet Opensuse -- Mandrake, which topped the charts for a while, Linspire (because they couldn't call it Lindows), Caldera, and the aforementioned Xandros. I almost certainly tried other distros from discs without knowing their names. 

Then came Ubuntu, which changed the game.