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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..., setup programs for msdos used to make changes to the autoexec.bat and config.sys files with few problems.
And as for the apt-get program, I've found that very few of the rpm sites tell me what lines I should put into my sources.list file. Nowhere on the freshrpms site, for example, do they give a sample.
I've mentioned this before, that in windows the responsibility for the setup is on the installing programs side and thus requires no special knowledge on the part of the user.
In linux, you have to know how to use apt-get, and rpm ( and in Suse 8.1 the rpm is outdated, so even if you download apt, you can't install it, and downloading a newer rpm.rpm runs into broken dependencies), and then you have to know which repositories have programs for your distribution, and THEN you have to know what to put into your sources.list ( because every rpm site has a different directory structure, and even if I know the directory structure, I'm still not sure even after reading the f*ing manual how to translate that into a source.list line, and besides, the urls I read in the browser do not necesarily corelate with the actual location, or maybe I'm just putting a backslash in the wrong place).
To make it short, apt is not perfect. It's nice when it's working, but getting there can be a struggle.