Hacker News Reader

Dude. Dude. Listen to yourself...

a) It is the same as in linux. Linux does not have a magic "Install this HERE" button for whatever problem arises any more than windows does.

b) The general, run of the mill, average person does not need, want or care about live cd's. Businesses (which form the main core of microsofts business) do not want, need or care about live cd's when they buy the system. So why should microsoft spend time on creating them when a super tiny percentage of users will ever use them?

c) Driver management (in my personal experience) is easier in windows than it is in linux.

d) Go back in time, before the internet, when linux package managers only showed you what was installed on the system at a given time and only offered you the option to install packages you had already downloaded/copied to the system. That is what the microsoft thingy (Cant remember the name atm) is. It might not be as fancy as the linux variant, but it is still, in fact, a type of package manager and the MSI files are still, in fact, a type of package manager. Enjoy your garage parking lot + valet.

The theme from your comments is that a inexperienced user, like your wife f.x. which you used as an example, has a easier time doing pretty much ANYTHING in windows than in linux. And through technical inexperience they can cause much more damage in a much shorter time on linux than in windows.

So just chill, relax, look at the sky. The dude was just correcting some inconcistensies in the original article. He wasnt attacking you personally. He wasnt attacking your personal view of the software world.

He was just writing a comment.

> a) It is the same as in linux. Linux does not have a magic "Install this HERE" button for whatever problem arises any more than windows does.

I would just like to point out that something like that is entirely possible: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:One_Click_Install

And as an example[1]: you can go to http://software.opensuse.org/, and type the name of a program[2] in there, and it will give you a quick description along with a link that installs that program by enabling the appropriate repository. This means you get the program automatically, in one click, and you get a working upgrade path since the repository is selected. I think that's pretty close to magic, and it is all centralised as well!

[1]: To provide a direct example: http://software.opensuse.org/package/chromium

[2]: It doesn't actually need to be a name, you can also type e.g. "Browser" and look through the results until you find something suitable and/or what you were looking for.

edit: formatting...

There have been efforts to get Chocolatey going - http://chocolatey.org/

I used it to setup most of my dev stuff in my box. VS, SQL server, Sublime, Git, and others - all installed using Chocolatey.

How's it like?

cinst git

and git is installed.

Based on Powershell.

What's the difference between "cinst git" and "cinst git.install" and why do both exist?

>I WISH there was a Windows 8 live CD. MS does not want you to "try windows" they want you committed.

I kind of have to take issue with this one... They handed out the pre-release version of Win 8 for a half a year. It had no upgrade-to-full option, but for anyone who wanted to try it, they put it out there.

I'll admit that they don't give you a lot of [read: any] try-before-you-buy options for Win 8 currently, but this is the first version in a while that they've done like that, so it might get better again.

Which only early-adopters and the techy side of the population would even remotely consider using, yes.

It doesn't count. At all. It was a "be nice to developers and crowd-source the bug-hunting" gesture, not a "lets get everyone in the world to try Win8 for free!" one.

While there is technically a package manager (as others have pointed out) I think what you mean is that there's no official centralized repository. That's a legitimate complaint I have with Windows and one of the reasons I wouldn't consider going back. It is baffling to me that Windows still requires their users to navigate to firefox.com to install Firefox, etc. For people I introduce to Ubuntu this is a major selling point.

Windows simply uses a decentralized approach to software discovery, based on the open web. Anybody can put their software up for download on their own website built with web standards, without having to go through any gatekeeper such as a distro manager. Multiple entities can offer software discovery services (Google, Yahoo, Bing... To say nothing of specialized services), again based on open web standards. It's a more bazaar-like system than the average Linux distro's official repository cathedral, but the huge variety of software available for Windows shows that it works pretty well.

There's no gatekeeper on linux systems. You're free to ship .deb, .rpm, .ebuild if you choose to. If you don't feel like rolling packages, a tar of the sources and a shell script that drops the right stuff in the right places will do in pretty much every case - you can even combine the two, as for example the wowza installer does. It's a tgz with the installer prepended. On the other side, if you want to get fancy, you can provide your own package repository and get dependency tracking for all your software and its OS dependencies as free addon.

So the package repositories are nothing but convenience for the end-user.

> So the package repositories are nothing but convenience for the end-user.

Isn't conveniencing the end user kind of the goal of all software? Surely there is value in tracking dependencies and conflicts (and in avoiding problems that can arise without these things) that should not reasonably be dismissed as "nothing but convenience". Perhaps I could say the same of every useful thing you've worked on.

> Isn't conveniencing the end user kind of the goal of all software?

I'm not debating that nor am I dismissing that package repositories provide tremendous value to the user. However, the parent asserts that package repositories act as a gatekeeper, thus making it harder for users to install software that is not in the package repositories. That's not true, since linux/BSD/MacOS package repositories just enhance an open system. In that context, they're mere convenience, not a requirement.

Until you have to get sstp-client, networkmanager-sstp versions that work on your particular API versions...

External dependency hell. Not in the repository, not invited.

I fail to understand your point. For any software, you can create a deb, rpm, ebuild that correctly models the dependencies and install it on the system. No package repo required. You can provide a package repo for any Linux system and install it from there, as for example the varnish people do. Both options provide full dependency resolution without a gatekeeper.

My impression was that they are trying to remedy that with the store(whatever they're calling it) in windows 8. Yes, I know it's not the same because that's only for metro apps but I guess it would be close enough.

Honestly, I haven't used windows(other than in VMs that is) since windows XP. When vista came out, I went "fuck that shit" and switched to ubuntu(then gentoo and eventually settled on Arch). Now my personal laptop is still running Arch and for work I use a macbook and an iMac(Hate the fact that you can't develop for iOS without OSX but meh, gotta be pragmatic).

TL;DR; I'm no expert but I guess they're trying to remedy that with the store thingy in Win8.

The store in Windows 8 isn't only for Metro apps, it has desktop apps too, the only difference is the store handles the discovery but doesn't handle the install of the desktop apps.

I suppose the closest is the Windows Store?

a) They install VLC. It plays everything you throw at it.

d) It does manage your software and you can use the package manager to remove software.

a) Even my grandparents worked out how to find and install k-lite codec pack.

b) No there is just no value in it. 99% of PCs come with it preinstalled. Why would they bother to target a few Linux users.

d) Yes there is. Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Installer - yes a fully transactional installation system. If you can work out which things not to put your penis in, then you can work out which web sites are trying to rip you off. Oh and they even bother to sign official packages and warn you if it looks dodgy.

a) good for them, that's a sample of 1.

b) I cannot agree more. However this is still a great parody as to the fact that getting even a sniff of windows is an effort in itself if you didn't have it installed.

d) Sorry, a unzip with rollback capabilities and upgrade tools. Still not close to apt / homebrew / etc. Look if windows installer didn't have the ability to say that MS Visual C++ distribution is a requirement for running this software, it would not be worth the space it takes on ur hard drive.

In any case. Let's do one with a linux user trying to install Mac OSX... Fast one

- Looks like I need to shell out 1000 dollars on a macbook air because there's no way to even try it out on my laptop without spending days making a "hackintosh"

> - Looks like I need to shell out 1000 dollars on a macbook air because there's no way to even try it out on my laptop without spending days making a "hackintosh"

To be fair, setting up a "hackintosh" install isn't really any harder than setting up Gentoo or Arch. It's not a very relevant comparison though; Unlike with Windows or Linux, the makers of OS X explicitly do not want people installing their OS on "PC" hardware.

d) except for the one in Windows 8.

They call it the "Store" because package manager is scary, and doesn't allow you to part with money quite so easily. Maybe someone should make a fork?

sudo apt-get install 99centgame --CREDIT_CARD 4959 4959 4959 4959 01/14