I would agree with many of the comments made by the reviewer, but I do not completely share all of his conclusions.

When Freespire 1.0 first came out, I was extremely excited about it. Lindows.com and then Linspire, had fallen behind in the rapidly changing landscape of software, and in the Debian world of free software, at times it seemed that Linspire was even trailing Debian Stable - which is rock stable, but crusty old to run on anything but servers. Linspire was feeling that way. With Freespire, I felt a fresh jolt of energy in the project.

Unfortunately, however, Freespire has not been able to sustain that momentum. Both Freespire 2.0 and Linspire 6.0 were months late getting out of the gate, and in the meantime, some very nice alternatives have appeared, including Linux Mint, which includes the plugins just like Freespire and Linspire, PCLinuxOS, an RPM based system that nevertheless uses the Debian apt packaging system - it also includes those non-free add ons, has easy package management, and really does not ask you to do a whole lot. Then there is SimplyMEPIS 7.0, which has been the model of stability and great packaging for free Debian systems for several years now. Finally, there are updates to the Ubuntu versions themselves, and additional tools, which make those versions easier to use than ever before.

I would agree that both Linspire and Freespire are about as easy as you can get in providing non free proprietary add ons so that consumers can just use the computer without worrying about all of the details. I would also agree that the language used in Linspire and Freespire installations caters more to the consumer than other releases.

There is one other vendor who also caters to a very similar audience: Xandros. These two vendors really stand out in ease of installation and use. Unfortunately, they also stand out in the industry as being the most tardy to keep their software reasonably up to date.

For the non-informed consumer, perhaps this is not a big issue. What is a bit disconcerting, however, is an uncertainty about whether the latest security updates are getting applied or if they are as tardy as the rest of the application software.

For these reasons, though ease of use it at the top of the industry, three or four other vendors are extremely close in ease of use, but much better in other aspects of software maintenance. Kevin Carmony, former President of Linspire, after leaving the company, questioned the need for either Freespire or Linspire, especially since they cannot seem to keep up. Sadly, I have to agree. Linspire ought to focus on rapidly improving and extending CNR and offering it across diverse free and commercial systems, and use that as their business model. I'm sorry, I just cannot see consistently using the base system. I can get the same with those other vendors with very little effort. If I were giving or selling systems to un-informed consumers, I would prepackage hardware and software, and this would not even be an issue, therefore it is not a strong selling point.

So while Freespire is still on top in ease of use, it is in the lower tier in most other areas and I can no longer recommend it for those reasons. Instead, I recommend SimplyMEPIS 7.0 plus Automatix2 to get that media capability, with alternates of PCLinuxOS or Linux Mint.

Personally, as more of a geek type, I use sidux, which can also acquire all the non free extras very easily. Not a newbie distro, but a true cutting edge distro. Different audience than the Freespire audience, but great software.

For those who do not mind old software, then yes, Freespire still makes a great choice.