Corel Linux first launched in 1999, from the same company that at the time owned the WordPerfect word processing software. While it was made to compete with Microsoft's Windows it quickly died off.

Anyone else remember Corel Linux?

  • Troy@lemmy.ca
    86·
    11 个月前

    I remember it and was there, on the KDE side of it. Summarized half-remembered version.

    Corel WordPerfect had been ported to linux late in the 90s and they got this notion that people only bought Windows to use MS Office. So if they made their own OS, people would buy it just to use WordPerfect. They had grand plans to take KDE and linux and package it as a consumer grade OS. The closest other competitor doing that at the time was Caldera, and they were seeing some success, so why not eh?

    They hired two people to “fix” KDE. But the people they hired had no idea how open source worked – how to interact with a community that functioned more like a meritocracy than a managed hierarchy. They showed up on the mailing list and tried to make demands – work on this, fix these bugs, adhere to our standards for this other thing, etc. When KDE didn’t jump to their whimsy, they sort of got annoyed and just decided to maintain a patchset or something.

    The distro flopped hard. And it started with their management. They could have instead hired a half dozen KDE developers that were already contributing, started feature or bug bounty programs (like Google Summer of Code, which was great but came later), and possibly have pulled something amazing together.

    • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      5·
      11 个月前

      Thanks, I didn’t know the whole story, I just piled it on the stack of failed-ish 90s OS attempts with OS2, BeOS, NeXT and probably a couple I’m forgetting.

  • erwan@lemmy.ml
    24·
    11 个月前

    Yes, the problem is that the main reason people used Linux was because it was Free Software.

    So a proprietary Linux didn’t bring the usual benefits of Linux, it was just one more proprietary OS. And unlike BeOS or NeXT it didn’t bring much to the table compared to Windows or other Linux distributions.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      11 个月前

      Yes, the problem is that the main reason people used Linux was because it was Free Software.

      Well, to be fair that was what the nerds using it at the time wanted. They weren’t Corel’s target consumer though.

      • erwan@lemmy.ml
        5·
        11 个月前

        Sure, but I don’t know what their value proposition for their customers was. Except “we want to take a piece of the cake from Microsoft”, which their customers didn’t care about.

        Why would anyone use that instead of Windows?

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    19·
    11 个月前

    I remember Corel Linux. It offered one of the nicest Linux desktop experiences at the time. If you wanted WordPerfect, it was also a great deal.

    Leveraging your word processing market share to establish an OS presence is the opposite of what Microsoft did.

    What is amazing about Corel these days is the museum of once market leading software that they still somehow sell. In addition to WordPerfect, who is using Quattro Pro ( spreadsheet ) or Paradox ( database ) these days? Who ever used their Presentation software?

    For that matter, who is using CorelDRAW? It was right up there with PhotoShop at one point but you never hear about it anymore.

    Like Nortel and Blackberry, it seems like Canada is able to grow massively successful tech companies but it just cannot hold on to them.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      7·
      11 个月前

      CorelDRAW is still in use. It’s vector graphics, it wasn’t competing with Photoshop. But there are also lots of good alternatives nowadays, which is why you hear less of it.

    • Moonrise2473@lemmy.ml
      3·
      11 个月前

      They’re talented in nostalgic acquisitions.

      They got WinZip, ulead video studio, intervideo winDVD, Roxio toast, Pinnacle video editor, Bryce, Ventura Publisher.

  • macniel@feddit.de
    16·
    11 个月前

    Uh… In what way does BeOS have any similarities to Windows 9x? It resembles more like Next step if at all. The Author never took a look at it huh?

    But no I’ve never heard of Corel Linux.

      • macniel@feddit.de
        2·
        11 个月前

        Yeah I guess that’s my fault here that I lived through the 90s starting with windows 3.1. I saw Teleshopping praising and selling the illegal BeOS variant Zeta. But I always found it’s dockable windows very cool. Something that no other OS ever did, not even today.

          • macniel@feddit.de
            1·
            11 个月前

            Does it? With Dockable Windows I mean the following: you have a file browser and a text editor and you snap them together so the titlebar acts as a tabbar and you can tab between the file browser and the text editor in the same window.

            • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
              2·
              11 个月前

              Yep, that’s Fluxbox tabs.

              https://web.archive.org/web/20240202172611/http://fluxbox.org/features/

              Tabbing is a nice feature that allows you to tab windows together. This can be combined with the “autogrouping” feature that is provided via the apps-file. This will make certain applications tab together by default.

              Tabs can eiher be embedded into the window’s titlebar as shown in the upper screenshot or they can appear as little tabs at the outside of a window such as the lower example. The position and size of the outside-tabs is customizable.

  • Mbourgon everywhere@lemmy.world
    9·
    11 个月前

    I used it for a good 2-3 years. More than anything, it was stable and reliable. Updates worked fine and it handled all my hardware, which I’d run into problems with on other Linuxes. No complaints, though migrating versions was a WTF, because there was no clear path with CLOS, so wound up learning Debian and their Toy Story-based version naming convention.

  • Quazatron@lemmy.world
    8·
    11 个月前

    I remember Corel Linux as a great disto. I used it for a while and found it very beginner friendly, polished, and it looked like it could one day become what Ubuntu eventually did.

    Unfortunately, Corel saw no revenue would ever come from it, so it was sadly dropped.

  • laurelraven
    6·
    11 个月前

    I didn’t use Corel Linux, but my first distro was its first (and I think only) descendant, XanderOS

      • laurelraven
        2·
        11 个月前

        No, just Xandros, the e was a typo on my part, and the OS wasn’t capitalized but stylized a different color than the rest of the name

        It’s long dead by now

  • JackGreenEarth@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    11 个月前

    Ok, KDE looks most like Windows 10 to the best of my knowledge, what looks most like Windows 11?

    • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      11 个月前

      KDE can look like pretty much anything. The default layout is generally Windows like with a lower panel with a menu and task bar to the left and a system tray to the right.

      Windows 11s big “innovation” is centring the task bar and start menu. In the latest version of windows 11 you can finally move it back to the left. KDE can already centre both or move to the left and much more. There are also windows 11 global themes in the KDE library, I’ve not tried them though.

      Windows 11 is otherwise not that different from windows 10. KDE already has all the graphical bells and whistles, and has long had a unified settings menu, and has way more flexibility for changing up the layout (it can be Mac like or old gnome like, or gnome 3 like or custom).

      A lot of the gnome 2 based WMs are also very flexible - xfce, cinnamon, etc. I’ve never used Gnome 3 - I assume it’s similar?

      • LeFantome@programming.dev
        1·
        11 个月前

        The only GNOME 2 desktop environment is MATE.

        MATE is a continuation of the GNOME 2 code after GNOME 3 came out. It literally IS GNOME 2 just with a different name.

        Cinnamon was also a reaction to GNOME 3 but it is an alternative desktop for GNOME 3 ( and newer ). It is mostly modern GNOME. It was never based on GNOME 2.

        The only thing XFCE has in common with GNOME is that they both use GTK. XFCE was originally based on XForms ( the XF in XFCE ). It certainly has nothing to do with GNOME 2.

      • leopold@lemmy.kde.socialEnglish
        1·
        11 个月前

        Xfce isn’t based on GNOME at all and Cinnamon is based on modern GNOME, not GNOME 2. Mate is based on GNOME 2, tho. All of them are very different from modern GNOME, tho.