> Unfortunately, software development has turned into a social endeavor
> the last decade or so. You can no longer obtain, learn, and use software
> without talking to other people who have written or obtained, learned,
> and used the same software.

That is unfortunate indeed. Finding the manual can be hard sometimes, 
but it's infinitely easier than finding a human being who actually knows 
WTF they're talking about and yet somehow still has the time to tell you 
about it...

>> latest Ubuntu basically asks you for a username and password, and then
>> just
>> *installs* itself. Next time the PC reboots, you have a fully-functional
>> Ubuntu install.
>
> And you know something funny? People who made that work get a lot of
> flak from the rest of the Linux developer community because they're
> working on user friendliness instead of on patching the kernel to
> frobulate 3% faster or something.

Well, yeah, but as a user, you can just vote with your feet... It's not 
exactly news that many Linux users consider user friendliness and easy 
usibility to be undesirable.

>> Essentially, things have evolved to the point where you can compare
>> Windows
>> and Linux, and see that each of them actually have merits compared to the
>> other. And the point we're currently arguing about is one of them. On
>> Windows, you just *install* stuff, and it works. Under Linux, you try to
>> install stuff, and mostly it just works... except when it doesn't. And
>> then
>> all hell breaks lose.
>
> I've never had software from a repository not "just work" when I
> installed it. Certainly no worse than Windows, which will still
> occasionally get confused enough to need you to uninstall and reinstall
> a device driver.

Problem #1 is when the software you want isn't in the repository, or is 
in a different repository. Problem #2 is when the package depends on a 
different version of some core library that everything in the entire 
system uses.

I've seen crappy Windows drivers do lame things. Applications tend to 
work reasonably well - except stuff written for Windows 3. (It depresses 
me how much software of that kind I still have to deal with at work...)

>> And it irritates me when people tell me I don't know what I'm talking
>> about...
>
> It would probably help if you less often proclaimed that you don't know
> what you're talking about in other fields. :-)

Alternatively, I guess I could just not talk at all. That would fix 
it... I mean, everybody thinks I'm an idiot, but I don't have to remind 
myself of that constantly I guess.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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