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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't use Corel Linux, but my first distro was its first (and I think only) descendant, XanderOS

I remember it being painfully slow on my hardware which was pretty good at the time.

Hey my first Linux distribution.

Looks like the novell(?) frontend to windows

I still have the inflatable penguin that came in the box

That nose-job is so, coral.

I remembering it being bundled for free on a CD with a computer magazine

Ok, KDE looks most like Windows 10 to the best of my knowledge, what looks most like Windows 11?