Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 29th Aug 2012 22:52 UTC
Miguel de Icaza: "To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions. This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. You would try once, do your best effort to support the 'top' distro or if you were feeling generous 'the top three' distros. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later. Supporting Linux on the desktop became a burden for independent developers." Mac OS X came along to scoop up the Linux defectors.
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Member since:2009-08-18
Yes because dropping down to the command line and editing repositories is something a normal person wants to do ... NOT!
And as you say it probably works the same way in another distro ... BUT NOT THE SAME WAY.
Miguel criticism is the fragmentation and you comment just proved it, you can do it a myriad of different ways depending on your distro. Even if you took all of the different way you normally would install these on Windows, it is still walking through an Installer Wizard.
Lets forget depending on the media player and whether your audio backend you might have to install different packages.
I can't be arsed with this shit half the time, and I am an OpenBSD user. If anyone else had to do this they would say "this is a bit shit isn't it".
Lets compare it to Windows
In Windows:
* Download Klite Codec Pack, VLC, iTunes or any other popular media player
* Install.
Edited 2012-08-30 11:20 UTC
Member since:2006-01-24
Yes because dropping down to the command line and editing repositories is something a normal person wants to do ... NOT!
I don't think you need to use the commandline to add repositories on say Ubuntu as this image suggests:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu?action=AttachF...
And on my distro the repo (extra) is enabled by default, no editing necessary.
And as you say it probably works the same way in another distro ... BUT NOT THE SAME WAY.
Well, naturally there can be differences between distros, they are essentially different operating systems sharing components, Linux is just the kernel. But I don't have to give a crap about how it works on 'other distros' anymore than I have to care about how it works on Windows or OSX, I only have to learn how it works on my distro and it sure isn't hard.
And furthermore, once you've learned to use a package manager it gets infinately more easy to manage your installed software than through separate uninstallers like on Windows, each with a tendency to leave crap behind leading to the well-known 'ever growing' Windows partition problem.
Even if you took all of the different way you normally would install these on Windows, it is still walking through an Installer Wizard.
Learning to click through a installer, using Ubuntu's app installation gui or using pacman -S or apt-get or OSX's method of either application bundles or installers are really no harder than the other in practice.
You learn it in 5 minutes or less. I don't get why you try to paint this as some major hurdle, I'm guessing you have fallen off that bike of yours one time too many.
Lets forget depending on the media player and whether your audio backend you might have to install different packages.
I'm not following this at all.
I can't be arsed with this shit half the time, and I am an OpenBSD user. If anyone else had to do this they would say "this is a bit shit isn't it".
Who is 'anyone else', certainly not me and certainly not the Linux users out there. I get it, it's too hard for you, but no one is forcing you to use it.
Lets compare it to Windows
In Windows:
* Download Klite Codec Pack, VLC, iTunes or any other popular media player
* Install.
Again, sudo pacman -S mplayer
then play movie, bluray, 10bit x264 encoded anime, tv series, dvd's etc
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Member since:
2006-01-24
You might be able to get them working, I might be able to get them working ... but it is still more effort than it needs to be.
Ehh, sudo pacman -S mplayer or sudo pacman -S vlc automatically installs the 'codecs' I could possibly need as dependancies together with either of the aforementioned programs on my distro (Arch).
I seriously doubt it's much harder on other distros (perhaps you need to enable a particular repo which is no harder than to google for and install cccp-codec-pack or whatever the rage is these days on windows).