Karlos wrote:
It's mindnumbingly easy. It's the easiest software install ever conceived. You don't have to do anything. It goes away, downloads the package, sorts out any dependencies, installs it, configures it and unless it is something very low level, your package is immediately ready to use.
In theory. How well the "dependencies are sorted" depends on the person writing the package. That is not 100% reliable. A 100k dependency ( within a total of 10 MB of dependencies) that wasn't updated when installing a 700k SNES emulator meant that I could no longer boot. So much for "robustness". I then dual-booted into XP, logged on the forums and found the solution eventually..how would an average user with one PC and only Linux at home do this? In contrast my XPPro system has not blue-screened once in 3 years, and never failed to boot and I've installed and removed all sorts of rubbish.
The concept of installing from a repo is flawed because it depends on the writer, of the particular package you want to install, knowing exactly what the writers of the dependencies have done. Thats impossible to be 100% certain when 1000's of little dependencies exist. But thats what happens beacsue Linux is a collaboration of thousands of independent programmers in all parts of the world, each with their own area of expertise. Its ridiculous that a 700k emulator needs an additional 10 MB of additional Operating system dependencies-written by various authors, at various times, just to work!!! 10x more code in the dependencies than in the actual program: OFCOURSE there is a high probability of soemthing going wrong. Most Amiga software installs from commercial software were self contained: you might need a 3rd party library but that was rare. Hell in many cases you just drag the folder onto the hard drive..
If you have the time and inclination to maintain your Linux OS by forever logging into forums, often to cut and paste text commands that you have no idea what they do and will never remember, then Linux is for you. For the rest of us we just want things to work, and i'll gladly pay $120 for a commercial operating system upgrade for that.
