After yesterday's "goodbye SUSE" post a natural fit would be a story where a truly company-independent distro beats Linspire. The winner here is PCLinuxOS, a Mandrake derivative.

Pretty good install, all the things I need working and as a bonus this is the only distro I have tried that will allow Audacity to run concurrently with other apps as well as allowing it to record and play in the same session!

Remember that Novell's deal with Microsoft is most harmful to distros which stand behind no monetised model. Thus, Novell-type deal undermine the very fundamental values of Linux, which is decentralised ny nature. Shane, my co-editor, is a a maintainer of an educational GNU/Linux distribution, so you can probably understand his frustration.

Novell and Microsoft continue to turn their back to standards and turn them into a business.

The two initiatives include - Microsoft’s first Interoperability Lab in India, designed to help customers envision and build solutions which are interoperable; Open Source Technology Program designed to further open source research and development of open source applications on the Windows platform in collaboration with leading engineering institutes in the country.

With standards, none of this is needed. Novell does not seem to care. The same goes to other sellouts, who seek to distinguish themselves by liaising with a sworn foe of all standards.

Image from Wikimedia