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·
    9 months ago

    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·
      9 months ago

      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·
    9 months ago

    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·
      9 months ago

      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·
        9 months ago

        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·
    9 months ago

    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·
      9 months ago

      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·
      9 months ago

      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
    164·
    9 months ago

    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
        22·
        9 months ago

        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·
            9 months ago

            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·
              9 months ago

              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.

      • macniel@feddit.de
        62·
        9 months ago

        Looks like win 95 IMO :-D

        • No Taskbar,
        • Tasklist on the top right (also not in front),
        • Dockable Windows,
        • Package Manager,
        • Bright Yellow half titlebars
      • Troy@lemmy.ca
        3·
        9 months ago

        You’re not wrong. KDE 1.x very much aimed at the Win95 market. They even directly targeted the windows userbase with jokes. The ordinal Win95 had a little fly-in animation that said “Where do you want to go today?” with an arrow pointing at the start menu. KDE 1.0 had this too, but it said “tomorrow” instead of “today”. Etc.

        KDE also stole good ideas from wherever they were found. Trash is thus called because of Apple. The virtual desktops came from CDE. Etc. Sometimes it stole too much, and we would have discussions about flying too close to the sun, and tweak something so it would be just different enough not to raise the ire of lawyers.

        Corel Linux was a KDE distro, so it largely had that familiar Win9x look, even if it felt different once you were actually using it. KDE later developed it’s own identity, but it retains its history and the baggage that comes with it.

  • Mbourgon everywhere@lemmy.world
    9·
    9 months ago

    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·
    9 months ago

    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@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        2·
        9 months ago

        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