Most of the programs on any computer (windows or Linux) will be 'months old'. The latest bug fixes are available using Mandrake Control Centre, or Yast or Synaptic so there's no need try and keep with by compiling everything manually.
I agree that the advantage of Winows is that its easy to package software for it and therefore there's more packaged software available. But with repositories of 10,000 packages or more modern Linux distros can usually satisfy 99-100% of all the software you'd need.
Someone can learn one way easily enough, but then they have to switch for some reason and suddenly it's just different enough to be frustrating
True but its hardly a big thing for even a newbie to learn to use GUI's like MCC or Yast or Synaptic - they're all pretty intuitive and all follow the same basic principles. There are a great variety of installer programs in the Windows world all of which are slightly different but all are pretty intuitive and follow the same basic principles. Users get by with that so they'll get by with the differences between MCC, Yast or Synaptic.
Obviously they might have some trouble with emerge this or urpmi that or yum this that but I was talking about the GUI versions, not the command line.
Its interesting that a lot of the criticisms of Linux software installation seem to pretend that there's no such thing as apt, yum or urpmi et al. and that they don't have nice GUIs like rpmdrake (Mandrake Control Centre), Yast or Synaptic or . All of which solve the dependency problem quite nicely and allow one or 2 click installs of software.
If you're going to criticise Linux's dependency handling I'd suggest you level your criticism against those systems as that's what newbie users will have to use to get software installed.
You must not have tried Suse or Mandrake (and others) if you think it takes an 'esoteric command' to install software. They have nice, easy to use GUIs where you can just type the name of the program , select it and then have it install, resolving dependencies automatically. I'd say 90% of computer users can handle this better than downloading an exe file, clicking on it and then going through a drawn-out install procedure of agreeing to this and choosing that directory etc.
The linux way doesn't stop you from going to the website either - once you've found the app you want all you have to remember is that instead of clicking the download link on the website you install it from the Mandrake Control Centre or Yast or whatever you use.
whenever you go to a software download site, you almost always see your SUSE and Fedora, but very rarely your Mandrake
Strange but I've never seen a Gentoo package for download from any 'software download site' outside of their repositories. And Suse and Fedora packages are pretty thin on the ground too - again outside of repositories.
The 4 most used Mandrake repos (main, contrib, PLF and JPackage) had just shy of 10,000 unique packages in them for 10.1, the main having about 3500 packages all supported by Mandrake with security and bugfix updates, much more than Fedora's 1900 or so. How many packages do Gentoo have in their repo? about 8000?
Any distro released every 6 months will have packages that are slightly behind - Fedora and Suse have this problem too. Gentoo may not but often the price is a bit less stability and less of the polish of a 'shrink-wrapped' distro (installer, hardware detection, out-of-the-box functionality, etc) as you mentioned.
why would I want to use a buggy, inflexible, incompatible ActiveX control to get my updates when I can either:
*Use the easy and fast GUI based updaters such as MandrakeUpdate, Yast or Up2date etc. or *cron script it automatically from the command line equivalent of the above and never have to worry about it. eg. #!/bin/bash urpmi --auto --update or *rsync the updates from the server to my network server, thereby saving significantly on bandwidth
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Most of the programs on any computer (windows or Linux) will be 'months old'. The latest bug fixes are available using Mandrake Control Centre, or Yast or Synaptic so there's no need try and keep with by compiling everything manually. I agree that the advantage of Winows is that its easy to package software for it and therefore there's more packaged software available. But with repositories of 10,000 packages or more modern Linux distros can usually satisfy 99-100% of all the software you'd need.
Obviously they might have some trouble with emerge this or urpmi that or yum this that but I was talking about the GUI versions, not the command line.
If you're going to criticise Linux's dependency handling I'd suggest you level your criticism against those systems as that's what newbie users will have to use to get software installed.
You must not have tried Suse or Mandrake (and others) if you think it takes an 'esoteric command' to install software. They have nice, easy to use GUIs where you can just type the name of the program , select it and then have it install, resolving dependencies automatically. I'd say 90% of computer users can handle this better than downloading an exe file, clicking on it and then going through a drawn-out install procedure of agreeing to this and choosing that directory etc.
The linux way doesn't stop you from going to the website either - once you've found the app you want all you have to remember is that instead of clicking the download link on the website you install it from the Mandrake Control Centre or Yast or whatever you use.
Strange but I've never seen a Gentoo package for download from any 'software download site' outside of their repositories. And Suse and Fedora packages are pretty thin on the ground too - again outside of repositories.
The 4 most used Mandrake repos (main, contrib, PLF and JPackage) had just shy of 10,000 unique packages in them for 10.1, the main having about 3500 packages all supported by Mandrake with security and bugfix updates, much more than Fedora's 1900 or so. How many packages do Gentoo have in their repo? about 8000?
Any distro released every 6 months will have packages that are slightly behind - Fedora and Suse have this problem too. Gentoo may not but often the price is a bit less stability and less of the polish of a 'shrink-wrapped' distro (installer, hardware detection, out-of-the-box functionality, etc) as you mentioned.
probably a lot quicker than to the average windows users computer
why would I want to use a buggy, inflexible, incompatible ActiveX control to get my updates when I can either:
*Use the easy and fast GUI based updaters such as MandrakeUpdate, Yast or Up2date etc.
or
*cron script it automatically from the command line equivalent of the above and never have to worry about it. eg.
#!/bin/bash
urpmi --auto --update
or
*rsync the updates from the server to my network server, thereby saving significantly on bandwidth