Anyone else remember Corel Linux?
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.
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.
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.
That stirs a memory. I think this was the first time I tried Linux. Corel Linux came on the CD accompanying the German gaming magazine Gamestar. When I tried it out I couldn’t see the mouse cursor. The mouse worked, the cursor was just invisible. Thus ended my first foray into Linux.
Found it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/gs-42000-b
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.
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.
They’re talented in nostalgic acquisitions.
They got WinZip, ulead video studio, intervideo winDVD, Roxio toast, Pinnacle video editor, Bryce, Ventura Publisher.
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.
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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.
Didn’t Fluxbox have dockable windows?
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.
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.
That’s cool. Thanks for sharing!
I remember it being painfully slow on my hardware which was pretty good at the time.
I didn’t use Corel Linux, but my first distro was its first (and I think only) descendant, XanderOS
Are you sure it wasn’t Xandros OS?
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
Hey my first Linux distribution.
If anything we should focus on React os
Ok, KDE looks most like Windows 10 to the best of my knowledge, what looks most like Windows 11?
I remembering it being bundled for free on a CD with a computer magazine
