Recently in Paid support Category

Scrolling through this week's Distrowatch, I came across an interesting new distribution in the "waiting list" of projects that will eventually be tracked by Distrowatch, should they survive long enough to ...get through the waiting list.

Lin-X aims to follow the Ubuntu distribution on which it's based but look as much like Apple's OS X as possible.

While I'm a user of OS X as well as Ubuntu (and Windows and OpenBSD ...) and I do like many things about the OS X user interface — the chief of which is the ability to keep an application running but NOT have a window of that application open at the time if I choose not to — I'm not one of those people who think OS X has it all over GNOME, KDE or even Windows XP.

But others might feel differently, and the ability to create a distro such as Lin-X from the parts provided by Ubuntu (and before that by Debian, and before that the Linux kernel, GNU userland, Xorg, GNOME and the many thousands of applications and utilities that go into many Linux distributions) ... that ability is something to be celebrated, since it gives us, the users, more choice and more freedom.

Anyhow ... while the OS X look of Lin-X is somewhat intriguing, what's even more intriguing about the distro is its revenue model.

Revenue model?

Yep, it has one. Aside from donations (which enter you in a drawing for a free Macintosh, there's an offer of e-mail support at $15 a year.

While it's not free, it's extremely cheap. Desktop support from the likes of Canonical, Red Hat or what have you will cost much, much more.

I won't get into why people who want to run an OS X-looking Ubuntu/Linux-acting OS on their PC hardware would be overly interested in winning some free Macintosh hardware — OK, maybe it's not as incongruous as it seems to me — but if this support is worth anything at all, it could be an extremely good deal for a business or individual who wants to run Ubuntu on the desktop, especially a Ubuntu designed to look as much as possible like OS X.

If you have any interest in Lin-X, download it here via Torrent, direct link via Adrive or Megaupload (the latter two of which I've never heard of ... but they appear to be legitimate ways of getting the ISO).

The only "stopper" here is that I can't find the name of the person or persons behind Lin-X, also known as probably the guy who wants your $15 and is promising you the chance at a free Macintosh in order to get it. Neither the About page nor the FAQ mention a single name.

That makes me a little squirrely about the whole endeavor, but then again, if you download Lin-X, run it and like it, $15 isn't much to part with even if you don't expect any support in return. So if you expect little, you probably won't be disappointed.

Disclaimer: I have neither download nor run Lin-X; I'm basing all of this on my reading of the Distrowatch article and the Lin-X Web site. My interest in running Ubuntu-derived distributions is limited to those that offer scads of audio-, graphic- and especially video-editing software; if it includes Cinelerra or whatever Cinelerra is morphing into by default, or anything aspiring to be the next Final Cut for FOSS, I'm there. In that aspect, I'll probably need a Mac eventually, but I'd much rather edit video in an all-FOSS environment, and that remains my goal.