Xandros

» see xandros.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

xandros was a paid desktop linux distribution out of new york, founded in may 2001 by will roseman and frederick berenstein through a holding company called linux global partners. its bet was the same one mandriva and linspire and lindows were making at the same time: convince a normal windows user to pay forty dollars for a consumer-friendly consumer linux desktop. they bought corel linux from corel in august 2001 when corel was getting out of the linux business, used it as a base, layered a customized kde on top, and shipped xandros desktop in 2002.

for five years it was a respectable second-tier desktop linux. xandros file manager looked like windows explorer. xandros networks was their package manager front-end. there was a samba-domain client for office windows networks. the niche was small business and home users who wanted out of windows but did not want to learn debian. i never bought it. by 2003 i was on a turkish ttnet adsl line and using whatever cd a friend brought home from a turkish linux event, which was usually mandrake or red hat, not xandros.

then in october 2007 asus shipped the eee pc 701 4g. the seven-inch netbook that started the netbook category. it ran xandros. for a brief window xandros was on the most-talked-about consumer computer in the world. by 2010 asus had switched the line to windows xp, the netbook category itself was being killed by tablets, and xandros had effectively stopped shipping releases. the company renamed itself bridgeways in 2013 and the original site went offline. there was no funeral.

~ the record ~

~ the eee pc moment ~

the eee pc 701 4g had a four-gigabyte ssd, a seven-inch screen, no fan, and an interface that booted in eighteen seconds into a tab-based menu of apps. that interface was xandros. when people talked about how their kid or their parent was using linux for the first time, what they meant was a 2007 eee pc running xandros. for about eighteen months that was the single highest-visibility desktop linux install in the consumer market anywhere.

then microsoft did the predictable thing. windows xp was already supposed to be discontinued, but microsoft extended the cheap oem licensing for ultra-low-cost devices and made it easier for asus and acer to ship the netbook category on xp instead of linux. by 2009 the majority of eee pcs were going out with xp. xandros's moment ended there.

~ what got buried with it ~

the consumer-desktop-linux business model died with xandros and linspire and mandriva together. the idea that you could sell a consumer-friendly linux for forty dollars a copy to home users, the way you sold windows, did not survive 2010. ubuntu took the desktop linux mindshare for free, chrome os later took the lightweight-laptop slot xandros had briefly owned on the eee pc. the paid-consumer-linux category just stopped existing as a thing.

a company called pc/opensystems bought the xandros and linspire names from the bridgeways holding company in january 2018 and is still selling community and enterprise editions of xandros-branded ubuntu remixes. it is not the same product. the original xandros, the new york company that shipped on the original eee pc, is gone.

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