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
<rant>
You really want examples, don't you? s1bl (there was another utility for my previous laptop, but I don't remember the name), fceux (obsolete version in Debian/Ubuntu), gens, PACC, any commercial program (MATLAB, Maple, Mathematica)... Many other smaller libraries that don't really worth mentioning, as they are quite specific to my research domain (vlfeat, libsiftfast).
Of course, it probably look like some meaningless grocery list to you. That's why I didn't bothered.
Now, I understand why you don't find some of them in main repositories. For this reason, I believe there is a place for something like Autopackage, even if it's not an ideal solution. It could be a nice way to get the latest version of a package while being less of a chore for the developers (a single package to build instead of a package for every major distros).
As people already mentioned before, you can find DEBs on the Internet, but you're a bit screwed if you don't use a Debian-based distribution.
I can live with compiling, but many non-developers could have an hard time dealing with compilation. It's not some hypothetical situation I got out of my ass, either. I remember ditching Linux and getting back to Windows when I was a newbie because I couldn't install the damn packages I wanted due to some compilation error. Eventually, I prevailed (after all, I'm now a computer engineer), but I wonder if I would have came back if smartasses had told me that it was a complete non-issue?
Make it easier to install software you can find outside the repositories. That was my point.
</rant>
If you still believe that it's a complete non-issue, so be it. I'll live. ;-)