I remember seeing the boxed copies of Lindows during my youth when my highschool buddies and I would, having nothing better to do, hang out at Best Buy. That was back when I thought I was cool because I had Windows 98 Second Edition and that 32 MB of RAM was plenty. Oh the sweet bliss of ignorance!

Even after agreeing to change its name to Linspire, many of us geeks still referred to the distribution affectionately as Lindows. Now this distribution is no more- now all Lindows/Linspire assets belong to Xandros.

The saddest thing about Lindows is what it was not. While other Linux distributions such as Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE grew and found a following, Lindows did not. Other distributors figured out that the consumer was too fickle and mindful of trinkets to truly appreciate the power of a UNIX-like operating system.

Today, you will find Red Hat on application servers running JBoss, not in your eight year-old’s bedroom as the operating system on her PC. You find SuSE on corporate workstations, not on home entertainment PCs in the living room. And that PC in the kitchen the busy working mom uses to check her email, play a few games, and maybe ordering a pizza online to feed her family? It’s not a Lintel box.

Sure, a few enlightened people among the masses want UNIX power in a consumer package. Those people own Macs. Linux belongs in the enterprise. The enterprise needs Linux. Linux can solve some of the problems facing the enterprise better than proprietary alternatives- rising costs, licensing issues, and flexibility.