All the OS you need which is not much | Hacker News Reader

All the OS you need which is not much

jonsteinberg.com

9 pointsjonsteinberg5 comments

[Jolicloud] allows me to install new apps without the hassle of Ubuntu. Believe me, I was running Ubuntu before and app install and maintenance is a headache.

I find this to be a bewildering comment. Unless you are trying to install something that is not in the extensive Ubuntu repositories, installation and maintenance is trivial.

Well, he doesn't appear to have much background in programming from what I gather. So perhaps having to use apt-get is a hassle for him.

Yes I'm not that technical. I find for the casual user that Synaptic and and command line installs can have issues. Also often dependencies are missing which requires me to fish around for whats missing.

I think Jolicloud offers significant app installation improvements for users only experienced with Mac/Windows.

From my experience installing apps on Ubuntu sometimes and more frequently has challenges I have not experienced in windows/mac. I could see my parents using Jolicloud - I think they'd struggle on traditional Ubuntu, even though I'm a big Ubuntu fan.

I played with Debian for a while and didn't like it. Slightly more annoying to use than rpm/yum. I know lots of people like apt, I just didn't, and I didn't much care for the stable/unstable/testing branches (I assume Ubuntu has the same hirearchy?)

This is a side-track, but can anyone tell me why distros aren't packaging their apps to be installable/run-able independently of each other? Eventually people want conflicting versions of software installed (i'll admit very rarely for a desktop user and more for systems whose OS doesn't change as often as their developers' application requirements) and you have to become a fire juggler with your now-custom packages. Just install every single application and library in its own path and use a wrapper to determine default symlinks for the base-system and reference alternatives directly as needed (apps can also link to their preferred library and path this way so that wouldn't be an issue). In fact, I wager you with this filesystem layout you could go much longer without upgrading your OS as newer libraries/binaries would simply be installed to deal with the new requirements and used accordingly. (I know this may sound complicated as hell but it's not much more work than the current man-hours put into setting up individual packages for building across multiple OS revs)

And another thing: Jolicloud's "ideas" page is the worst web 2.0 market-speak i've ever seen. I can't take that OS seriously.

For a moment I thought that was Jon Stewart. Anyway interesting site.

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