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Deal.

When one distro figures out how to do things right (which includes ditching package management) and goes beyond re-inventing the wheel with a slightly different circumference, it will skyrocket into the mainstream.

So, "when one distro markets itself enough to go mainstream (like almost everything mainstream), people will want to develop for it." No arguing that.

It will no longer have to worry about package management because people will actually WANT to make packages for it, like they do on Win and Mac.

At such a level package management is just a term. You could correctly call a Windows' package repository "the software section at Best Buy." But I guess you are saying "don't call it that!" Sure.

You basically admit Linux distros need package managers because they can't get developers to make packages for Linux.

Actually there are many Linux packages out there. A bunch of tar balls made to run on Linux. Also each popular distro has many packages for it. Red Hat even gets a lot of third party stuff. Its there, just as much as it should be considering the marketshare.

This should be seen as a "red alert - we are failing" signal to the distro/OS.

As long as Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu and the like stay in business they are not failing.

Instead, there is this impression that really, nothing is actually wrong with our distro, we just need to put 5000 software packages into our distro and then it will be great. Let's not all gang up and fix the problems with the desktop software, instead let's package up broken and poorly written software to run on top of it so that people can install it via a searchable GUI.

I'll have you know its a very nice GUI. And some of the programs often packaged are not poorly written. And you saying things like "gang up" while telling me in your first paragraph why this can't be the case.

But that is the attitude that people have to deal with when they want to improve Linux. I mean, it's just software. Do you want it to be easy? Make it easy!

Thats the motto of Linux. You want it, make it! I personally think Ubuntu is getting easy enough for me. For some people it won't be there till everything has a GUI. For others it won't be there till it can do everything Windows can do. For others it won't be there till it can work with 90% of hardware. For some it can never be.

You were correct at first. Linux doesn't care about the desktop. Its just software. Linspire, Xandros might care about the home desktop but hey can only do so much. Ubuntu, SUSE, and Red Hat are all focused on the business desktop because there are less demands and that is where the money is. Maybe one day a great home user desktop based on Linux will emerge. Maybe it will be based on BSD or Hurd, who knows. All I know is that each distro is doing the best with what they got, and for some of us its enough. If its not enough for you or that random women who you say doesn't want Windows then too bad. What you want is obviously not an easy task: millions of dollars and tons of top minds have been thrown at the problem yet they cannot discover the solution with the ease you have. Maybe because its really hard. Maybe if you have 1% of less desktop marketshare it might be smarter to bundle programs rather than depend on that marketshare to bring developer support. Maybe not, your users can always use autopackage. Or Kilk (which seems to be really close to what you want). An easier desktop based on Linux is being made today and next week. Its just hard to meet so many demands so its not there yet for all. Its there for me.

Have you heard of Klik?
It's aim is to eventually allow all packages in Debian's ATP repository (that's a lot of software) to be installed and run just by clicking a link in the web browser.

lsh.

Admittedly I'm a reluctant user of OSX, having to use it at work from time to time and haven't spend more than a couple of weeks working with it. From the outset, a useability deficit was immediately apparent; OSX still hasn't provided a means of finding software and delivering it to the user.

How depressing it was to find that Apple users are still stuck with the oldest problem in software installation, and that is finding the software first. Windows users considering switching will find this to be as depressing as it was on win32, and similarly we hear Mac users that have moved to Linux cheer endlessly about the ease of software installation using a system such as apt.

So boring it is to spend countless hours trawling around websites looking for software, and there's so little on the machine out-of-the-box. OSX really doesn't push much further than the windows paradigm in this regard. There's this fink but last time I tried it was all a bit hacky and suffered issues worse than those in any Linux distribution I've used.

In short, nothing I've tried comes close to software installation in Linux; Linux brings the software to me.

Where the *.dmg is concerned, while convenient (once you have actually found the bloody thing), it is certainly not unique to the Apple platform. Linux already has two perfectly good solutions to this would-be problem.

One is http://autopackage.org/, and a completely different approach (and quite impressive) is Klik http://klik.atekon.de/.

Then again last time I looked searching for a package and clicking the conspicously named "Install" button in Kpackage or Synaptic seems to suit vast numbers of lazy, or just plain busy Linux users out there.

The beauty of Autopackage is, as a developer, I can make one package for all distributions of Linux. With Klik, I only 'install' the software for that session (in fact it is run from cache).

Given that OS X has shown us the power of this method, why haven't any distros latched onto it?

Klik is a one-folder package system, but it is styled as a "run without installing" system for KNOPPIX and Debian. I like the idea but haven't used it extensively:

http://klik.atekon.de/

I don't think you can freely (freely as in it would work) copy the directories around the fs or to another machine, though.

Old habbits aren't always the best. There is a lot of clicking next in Windowsland that doesn't need to happen.

- they're forced to use a commandline interface for a package manager or compile something or some other nonsense they care not to learn.

BS.You can use great GUI tools to install, and use great internet tools to avoid installing.Both ways seem far better to me than "next, next,next,next,next,next,next,etc."

Klik http://klik.atekon.de/

Or Iris from the now defunct Lycoris?

Or perhaps like the Linspire ClickNRun Warehouse http://clicknrun.com/

or perhaps you mean like Damn Small Linux's Click and Load Desktop http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/ damnsmall/mydsl/apps/

Or do you mean an Installer like Windows Installers - well they have that too http://autopackage.org/ for instance.

Not to mention Synaptic, K-Package, Yumi, and there are more graphic frontends to Yum and Apt where all you have to do is set the repositories and then just click the program for install and let it go and do its work.

DUDE WTF!!! How much easier can it get than browse to page of the app, read a description and perhaps look at a screenshot- then click it and it installs and configures itself. You don't get any more hand-holding than that.

Perhaps you haven't used a Linux in a while or perhaps you are a paid shill- Either way you seem to not know the current lay of things.

Although DRM is bad!!! What MS is trying to do here goes beyond evil... No more used computer market, no more switching oses, No more running "untrusted"(Read FOSS/Non-MS) apps, uhmm... pretty much MS wants to trun your machine into a pile of crap.

You mean something like Klik?

I'm sorry, but a lot of that, if not rubbish, is an exaggerated account of how things used to be.

The average user will not be adding other repositories to their system. They will not have to use the command line, they wont have to worry, care or even know about dependencies.

They will have a package manager that came with their distro that takes care of everything with one repository. Any program that is not in their repository is beta software at best that the average person does not need to be messing with. More so for programs that only come in source code.

I can install a program in less than 30 seconds. I don't get asked any questions about where it should go. I never have to reboot my computer. If I want to use the internet to klik on an app to install it I can do that too.

If you had a hard time getting an easy productive desktop, you probably just had the wrong distro.

Which is the only weakness when it comes to newcomers. They have to get the right distribution in the first place. But none of those hardships you mention ever has to be suffered through in any of the distros reviewed in this article. And they didn't even cover Mepis or Ubuntu.

The why are all the "supported distributions" Debian based ones, and the documentation page on "Using with Other Distributions" only lists SuSE as non Debian based, says it is "harder to support" and then has a long set of instructions for what you need to do to make it work? That does not sound like easy installation to me... it sounds like rather painfully difficult installation for any non Debian based distributions.

Klik is a very nice system, and it works admirably for Debian based systems, but ostensibly its just providing Debian packages the same as the Debian repository. Any packages it provides that aren't already in the Debian repository have been packaged for Debian. Therefore it isn't really a solution to third party packaging issues (which was the original point I was replying to).

Jedidiah.

It's a good start.

What you really need for these tricks is process-specific namespaces with bind mounts. Oh, wait, that's available in Linux. hmmm.

One existing user of bundled applications on GNU/Linux is klik which was originally designed for installing additional programs on Knoppix by simply installing the klik client and clicking on links on the klik site. Klik has evolved since it's inception so that now it builds compressed images as bundles, supports 4 distributions (Knoppix 3.7, Kanotix BHZ, Simply MEPIS 2004.04 and Linspire 5.0), can work with dialog|Xdialog aswell as kdialog and firefox|elinks aswell as konqueror and finally offers the entire debian sid archive by klik (and many other changes). This is "next generation" klik, and while it is still evolving it is a very useful tool especially for debian based systems and livecds in particular.

A lot of the posts in this thread seem to repeat the same arguments against bundles (the duplication and security issues of having shared libraries in bundles) but nobody mentions the prime advantage I see in them. They can be summarised with this present from probono, a cmg of OpenOffice.org 1.9.65 which can run on many distributions (it uses a Linux transparent compressed iso for it's image rather then the normal cramfs to extend compatibility). So you can try out a preview release of ooo2 without having to upgrade any of your system, no need to have a test setup to try it out or wonder what risks you are taking that you might break something trying out experimental software.

Another aspect which klik deals with in it's own way that hasn't been discussed much here is that klik assumes a base system, the set of all packages installed in all it's supported systems with the minimum expected version being the lowest version in any of the supported distributions. This means that everything in the base system of your distribution is still handled everywhere by it (so updating your base system updates the common packages), everything outside of this will be bundled in any applications which need it.

Just remember to look at the klik docs and the klik forum if you have any problems.

One existing user of bundled applications on GNU/Linux is klik which was originally designed for installing additional programs on Knoppix by simply installing the klik client and clicking on links on the klik site. Klik has evolved since it's inception so that now it builds compressed images as bundles, supports 4 distributions (Knoppix 3.7, Kanotix BHZ, Simply MEPIS 2004.04 and Linspire 5.0), can work with dialog|Xdialog aswell as kdialog and firefox|elinks aswell as konqueror and finally offers the entire debian sid archive by klik (and many other changes). This is "next generation" klik, and while it is still evolving it is a very useful tool especially for debian based systems and livecds in particular.

A lot of the posts in this thread seem to repeat the same arguments against bundles (the duplication and security issues of having shared libraries in bundles) but nobody mentions the prime advantage I see in them. They can be summarised with this present from probono, a cmg of OpenOffice.org 1.9.65 which can run on many distributions (it uses a Linux transparent compressed iso for it's image rather then the normal cramfs to extend compatibility). So you can try out a preview release of ooo2 without having to upgrade any of your system, no need to have a test setup to try it out or wonder what risks you are taking that you might break something trying out experimental software.

Another aspect which klik deals with in it's own way that hasn't been discussed much here is that klik assumes a base system, the set of all packages installed in all it's supported systems with the minimum expected version being the lowest version in any of the supported distributions. This means that everything in the base system of your distribution is still handled everywhere by it (so updating your base system updates the common packages), everything outside of this will be bundled in any applications which need it.

Just remember to look at the klik docs and the klik forum if you have any problems.

There's no mention in this of klik which allows you to simply download and run other software with knoppix (and other systems). Klik even gave everyone a christmas present of a 100M download of openoffice2 (well 1.9.65 or something similar) which allows you to try it simply and without installing, no need to upgrade your system and risk impacting anything else.

A second quick point is that it doesn't seem to provide useful information on encrypted DVDs. It is quite easy to download and extract libdvdcss2 and run xine so it can find the extracted libraries (LD_LIBRARY_PATH) so with a 27k download you can watch any DVDs you like with the existing xine.