History Unix/Linux

Corel Linux: the OS that could have changed the world?

Dylan Beattie (27.05.2024)

In the early 1990s, the Corel corporation created CorelDRAW!, a truly excellent vector graphics program for Microsoft Windows. Then they bought WordPerfect, tried to port it to Java, failed… then in 1999 they released a GNU/Linux distribution – Corel Linux. It should have been amazing. It’s possibly the closest we ever came to a genuine “Linux on the desktop” challenger to Microsoft’s de facto monopoly… but the fact you’ve probably never heard of it suggest this is not, in fact, what happened. Let’s fire up Corel Linux in a VM, see what all the fuss was about, and talk about where it all went wrong.

 

If you want to try it out yourself, instructions are on my blog:
https://dylanbeattie.net/2024/05/27/running-corel-linux-on-qemu.html

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