Xandros – the Linux company that isn’t

“Xandros was spun out of graphics and office automation software
maker Corel in 2001, and the company (along with its Linspire
acquisition) tried to make Debian Linux as friendly (or familiar or
as frustrating or something like that) as Windows. The company’s
experience as a commercial operating system distributor has served
it well as it creates custom app stacks for companies making small
computing devices.

“This is not necessarily an easy business. According to Smith,
Xandros has created over 200 variants of its Linux distro for Asus,
in 24 different languages with all manner of character sets –
something you have to do in the commercial electronics space. You
have to do lots of languages for a commercial Linux distro too. But
as Smith says, Xandros has learned from hard experience that “there
is no money to be made with a general purpose desktop Linux”
because of the massive matrix of possible hardware you also need to
support to be a general purpose OS.”

Complete
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