Linked by David Adams on Mon 24th Aug 2009 09:21 UTC
A reader asks: Why is Linux still not as user friendly as the two other main OSes with all the people developing for Linux? Is it because it is mainly developed by geeks?
My initial feeling when reading this question was that it was kind of a throwaway, kind of a slam in disguise as a genuine question. But the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I felt. There truly are a large amount of resources being dedicated to the development of Linux and its operating system halo (DEs, drivers, apps, etc). Some of these resources are from large companies (IBM, Red Hat, Novell). Why isn't Linux more user-friendly? Is this an inherent limitation with open source software?
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Member since:
2005-06-30
Where did I claim that it is bad? Looks like you don't even bother to read.
Except that Debian doesn't have the latest version...
Does it matter that the average user won't use Eclipse? Repositories are for everyone, from the clueless noob to the developer.
Anyway, I won't bother to list packges you don't know as it would be futile, just like discussing about Eclipse. By the way, the latest version is 3.5/CDT 6.0, while Karmic/Unstable got 3.4/CDT 3.1... Fortunately, you can run the IDE from the tarball found on Eclipse's website.
Actually, I never claimed that repositories were a bad idea. They are quite great.
However, you seem to claim that everything you will ever need is in a repository... From my experience, this is not the case, hence why I'd like to see a system for installing packages outside repositories in a distribution-neutral way.
To what I remember, there is Autopackage but it never really caught on...