Insightful (non-trolling) criticism of Linux

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3 points·smanek··5 comments

Thank you. Finally someone who hates packaging as much as I do. Repositories can be nice, but the get all your software from one place method seems counter to the goal of free/libre software. It's what people criticize Apple for on the iPhone. The problem with package managers is that they are a kluge that works just well enough to stop the development of an installer system that works.

You're not limited to getting all your software from a single place: you can add repositories to your package manager.

If the publisher has made the package available but not in a repository, you can download it and install it through the package manager --- the package is the installer.

Good point. It's still not as easy as downloading a .app file on Mac. Maybe if there were a firefox plugin that opened the package and installed it through the distro's package manager. I'm lazy so I tend to look for the solution that requires the least amount of effort for the user.

There's no need for a firefox plugin, you just need the mime type set correctly and it opens up in your package manager. Enter password, it installs.

This may be slightly more effort than copying an .app from a disk image, but it doesn't leave a disk image mounted.

The problem with the Linux community is those who write LHB off as a troll... Pretty much everything he (or she!) says is bang on.

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