Preinstalled Mandrake Linux PCs go live at Walmart. Especially without Internet hooked up, Lindows wasn't very friendly.
Its Click-N-Go Warehouse does resemble the system Adam Wiggins writes about in his Top 10 Things Wrong With Linux, Today: #4 Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things. Rather than being named by explicit task, though, the Programs menu is broken into different categories (much more general than Open Directory Project's software categories). Each category had a group, some of them having programs already, but all of them having an "Add..." option that opened the browser to the appropriate page.
This reliance on the Internet was a bit annoying, since Lindows didn't check if it was on the net first, it just threw the browser up and let it spew its cryptic message about not finding the host. Yeah, an Internet connection is roughly a given these days, but it would've been more useful if it had come with some installed software, or at least a potentially out-of-date Warehouse catalog to browse.
But that's my opinion, and in short order I'd replaced Lindows with Windows XP. None of the points in the other popular Linux article going around, A Linux user goes back, apply, since even in my personal home environment, I only use Linux as a stable back-end OS. So there you go.
