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:2005-07-07
Exactly. It's a strawman. I could just as easily say that it isn't an issue because I said it isn't. You don't offer proof. It sounds a lot like that BS line you hear from cable news anchors trying to pretend to be un-biased when they say "some people say". It's a load of crap.
Like I said before it's a non-issue. It doesn't hurt the user friendliness in any way. The only example you can even come up with is the fact that the latest version of eclipse isn't available yet in the repository which is hardly a deal-breaker.
You keep making this claim but the only piece of software you mention is Eclipse and it is available in the repository just not the latest version. This entire discussion is about the user friendliness of Linux yet your whole argument has nothing to do with user friendliness and more to do with the up-to-dateness of one distribution. Don't blame me for misunderstanding what point you are trying to make because it seems completely irrelevant to the discussion.
It does make it a non-issue. I mentioned before that it is a rarity to have to install something outside of a repository. I didn't say it never happened. You only proved my point when the only example you can come up with is available, only as a lesser version number. It's not ideal but it really is a non-issue.
Who knows but I'm still wondering why you have so much time to make these points but so little time to prove them by naming the specific issues you are having. I concede that Eclipse isn't available in the very latest version but it doesn't change anything I said from the beginning. You are still basing your whole argument on one piece of software, which makes that issue a rarity in my opinion, which is exactly what I said before.
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. ;-)
Member since:
2005-06-30
My initial message was: "If installing software outside the main repositories of a distro was such a non-issue, people wouldn't raise it as an issue."
The only claim I've made was that a centralised repository system isn't perfect, as you depend on the maintainers. If the maintainers don't care about your software, you're out of luck.
A few months. You don't even know what you're talking about, yet you keep telling me I'm wrong?
I never said this specific case was a deal-breaker. However, you claimed that getting software outside repositories is a rarity, yet a significant part of my software is customly installed on my system.
I don't think I'd represent the average user, but does that make this a non-issue? Should we only consider average web-surfin' grandmas?
Geez, I'm sorry to be a Linux user that doesn't think like you... Seriously, why would I bother with such futile discussion if I had no personal motivation?