Linked by Jason Vagner on Fri 16th Apr 2004 20:37 UTC
O'Reilly's latest entry in the "Pocket" series, "Linux Pocket Guide", bills itself as a "quick reference for experienced users and a guided tour for beginners".
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Well duh. There's only a few commerically supported distros now.
The difference is that various distros are almost 100% compatible with each other. Yeah, if closed source app makers only choose to let the install work on certain distros (not through technical issues, but for support/laziness reasons), that's a problem, but you're/they're missing the whole idea.
The goal is to be using 100% Open Source apps, so that way you don't need a package from the app creator, the package maintainers for the distro just need to package it up. Yes, it's different than Windows, but it allows for more freedom.
Of course the major commercial apps won't go open source anytime soon, so they should provide a tar.gz. You should be able to just untar it to /opt/app or something. This is the best solution, because every distro has tar/gzip. I suppose there'll be linking/binary problems, but that'll always be an issue with closed source apps because people can't just recompile.