Linked by Adam S on Sun 6th Apr 2003 17:18 UTC
This is my reaction to Tsu Dho Nimh's "Migrating to Linux not easy for Windows users" featured on Linuxworld.com recently. It's not a response, I'm not challenging his opinions, which I feel are not only valid, but mostly right, it's just a reaction.
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Both Gentoo and Debian-based system have the ability to do exactly what you described. I use Gentoo and haven't manually downloaded a piece of software since I started.
apt-get mozilla, mozilla and its dependencies are installed.
emerge mozilla, mozilla's source and its dependencies are installed and compiled.
Well, apt-get is not quite as intuitive as you make it sound. On Debian stable, if you do 'apt-get mozilla', unless you make some changes to the sources.list file or use the unstable version, you're probably not going to get version 1.3. And I'm not even going to get into the amount of effort it takes for a first-timer to get Debian up to the point where you can even start throwing apt-get commands at it in the first place.
Even in some Debian-based distros like Xandros, if you try to throw the 'apt-get mozilla' command at it (I've actually done this), it's going to tell you that you have the latest version installed, even though the version installed is like 1.01.
What in the Windows world can match this?
Eh, pop in the CD/double click on Setup, Next, Next, Finish. Not as quick as apt-get mozilla, but considering that you don't have to put up with Debian and sources.list, and packages that break and/or misbehave because you didn't get it/couldn't find it in the 'official' repository, I'd say it's worth the effort.
And even so, in the future, when computers are all-powerful and you can actually speak to them, you could say:
"Ok, download and install for me the latest nightly build of Mozilla (or latest stable version, or version 1.3, or latest beta version, or whatever). Since I don't know what kind of bugs the nightly build has, please don't overwrite my original installation. Oh, and I forgot to install Flash when I originally installed Mozilla, so please download and install Flash for me and make sure it works for both versions of Mozilla"
And then the computer would process the request, ask you any questions if it doesn't understand, and then go do it. I'd love to see you try and do that with apt-get