I also bought and used Corel Linux when it first came out. It was great. To me it is still the closest thing Linux ever had to being a really user-friendly des

I also bought and used Corel Linux when it first came out. It was great. To me it is still the closest thing Linux ever had to being a really user-friendly desktop OS. No other Linux distribution ever since quite got that right as they did. It was based on a heavily customized KDE, they even replaced the entire KDE file manager with a new one written in-house (heavily inspired by Explorer). It worked so well, especially the integration of network share access - both SMB and NFS - which was often a pain on Linux back then, but on the file manager in Corel Linux, it just worked. But what I remember most about it was the beautiful icon theme they had made for it. They had applied it to everything, every single application was themed to look nice and consistent. Included was the Linux version of WordPerfect, which was great in days long before OpenOffice became a credible alternative. They also had a Linux version of Corel Photo-Paint, although that was half-emulated via WINE, but still worked well. Unfortunately, the hardcore Linux crowd seemed to despise it, I guess because it was too user-friendly (even today many people in the Linux world are opposed to the idea of GUIs and user-friendly software, back then it was much worse) and maybe due to their inclusion of proprietary software. And then Corel killed it off, and the year of the Linux desktop never happened. The assets were then picked up by another company called Xandros, which continued it somewhat, but IMO it was never the same again.