On Sat, 08 Oct 2011 09:42:26 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 10/8/2011 5:40, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> It's hard to understand why people have trouble affording a single hard
>> drive when you buy in such bulk quantities.
> 
> And remember that you're not really their big customer. When 85% of your
> sales go to the OEMs, worrying about whether this one guy can afford to
> upgrade his disk doesn't really make sense. Especially since if you
> can't afford a $50 disk, you can't afford a $200 OS. :-)

That's certainly true.  But chances are if you bought the machine, 
Windows was included.

>> After all, on Windows, you have CIFS/SMB available on all systems by
>> default.  You take it for granted on Windows, but for the rest of the
>> world, there is a choice.
> 
> Actually, it's there by default, but it doesn't have to be. You don't
> need to have any networking installed at all if you don't want. Not even
> TCP/IP.

I guess that's true, but kinda beside the point.  The point is there's an 
entire ecosystem of DLLs and system drivers/files that are necessary for 
Windows to run if you want to run Notepad or Word.  Just because on 
Windows there's exactly one option means that all that stuff is installed 
by default.

Linux brings a number of choices - for better or for worse - and bitching 
about having to install the entirety of the KDE libraries to run k3b (for 
example) because it's a better disc burning tool than brasero (which is 
the GNOME utility) is kinda disingenuous.

>> upgraded to each incremental pre-release alpha, beta, and release
>> candidate on several of their internal servers.
> 
> I can imagine that would screw stuff up. Most people don't design
> upgrades to deal with every intermediate release of the software.

The guys at Microsoft I talked to (this was back in 2002/2003) said it 
was a complete nightmare.

>> RPM does a pretty good job of dependency management,
> 
> I think it's more that the programmers don't. They assume you have
> enough disk space, a fast connection, and etc.  I bet the people writing
> the editors would avoid the need to include SAMBA if you said "we'll
> give you $1000 for every package you don't depend on."

True, and it does come down to developers identifying the prerequisites 
appropriately.  There are sloppy coders in both OSS and closed source 
development, so that's not really a problem unique to Linux.

It is perhaps more common in Linux than it should be, though.

Jim

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