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Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey
tim1980 writes "Derek Croxton has written a rather long editorial on how he sees the Linux and Open Source communities, and his personal experiences with Linux, the editorial is titled Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey and is over 3,500 words. Excerpt: 'A novice's greatest fear is sitting in front of a motionless command prompt with no idea what to type; or, as so frequently happens, knowing a command that he copied verbatim from a document discovered on the internet somewhere, but with no idea of what it means or how to alter it if it doesn't behave exactly as advertised.'"
I know this is offtopic, however Slashdot should seriously consider Coralizing popular links by appending .nyud.net:8090 to the URL. At the very least the first page would be cached by the Coral servers.
All I'm saying is that, barring applications for which there are known compatibility issues between Windows versions, you can basically download any application installer and it will work on Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, 2003, etc. (and don't shrug off this fact, there is a LOT of software compatible "out of the box" on all these systems). My question is why can't Linux do this? Why can't I get a Redhat RPM and install it on, let's say, a Slackware machine without any additional work?
Installing software in a consistent manner _is_ a big deal. Why are there twenty different ways to install the same piece of software depending on what distribution of Linux you're using? Why can't someone say "if you're using Linux, this is how you install software"? You don't think this would be a tremendous help to Linux?