I’ve used both Windows and Mac OS X, and I don’t know how people manage to install software on them. Yes, I’m a fan of aptitude (and I’ve had good experiences with Yum).
It’s pretty clear to me that this software installation system has tremendous advantages over the traditional “download a random binary package from somewhere” approach common to Windows and Mac OS X, as long as the package you want is in the proper repository.
That also works nicely for checking updates. Yet it’s not perfect, yet. Federico Mena Quintero’s Software updates for home users tells the story of how the process still needs some refinement.
Both of my parents could handle this process, but they can get so much more and better information from a system with a little bit more polish. Perhaps it’s time to see software installation and upgrades as one of the killer features of fully-free desktop operating systems–and do everything possible to keep this advantage.
Mister Frederico shows to be a total moron, in his opinion, a computer system should work like his toaster: plug it in, press start, a red light acknowledges the start mode, a beep warns about the ready status and the slice of bread pops out! Maybe that is a tipical mentality of a novell employee.
No wonder MsWindows base is so large.
(ooops and Novell jumped on the wagon with them now what we got? Windowell or Nowindows?)
Learning to administer a Linux OS distribution requires basic education: reading, learning and operating stuff at which himself balks away with disgust.
Point and click expecting magic is not all that the PC experience is all about.
What about when the click does not work? Blame the morons who designed the Operating System? I thought so....
One of the reasons for debian's success as a meta-distribution is its ability to easily handle new software installation and updates. dpkg and friends (apt, aptitude, synaptic, etc.) are effective ways to manage a system or group of systems. Ubuntu has refined this system greatly and debian is taking on some of those refinements, like the update-system icon in the "notification area."
The Mac of course has the "Software update" tool which does pretty much what Federico Mena Quintero wants update tools to do. It obscures the gory details from the user. Fink is also available for the Mac if you want the world of debian on your Mac, which of course you would, giving you an apt-get tool.
I think Azar is wrong when he says Frederico is a moron, quite the contrary. I think Frederico gets it and kudos for him to say so, this can only help make updates less painful for us all. Ubuntu and debian have shown that installation and upgrades matter, linux has innovated to this leading position, it is time to develop more sensible interfaces for these tools so that we keep this advantage just as chromatic says.
Azar - I think it's time for your medication ..
@Azar, I'm a developer and I don't often want to worry about the technical details of all of the updates on my system. Sometimes I do, and I'm glad that I can go to the command line and look through the logs and install and uninstall and upgrade and configure everything by hand--but being able to do that and having done that in the past doesn't mean that I want to do that for every upgrade in the future.
I certainly don't manipulate the registers and stack pointers in C by hand when I can simply call a function and let the compiler worry about it all for me.