Installing Software on Linux, the Mac way...
2006-12-21-Thursday | Computer
For quite some time, I've felt that installing
software on linux is ... well.. not without problems.
There is a very nice blog about this titled "Is Ubuntu an operating system?" I do agree with most of what this blog is saying.
In general there are one or several large repositories of pre-packaged software, for your Linux distribution, Ubuntu has theirs, Fedora has theirs, OpenSuse has theirs, etc. Apart from the obvious double work being done by packaging the same application for different distributions, this also gives other problems.
One very clear example is a very serious bug that made OpenOffice useless under Ubuntu Edgy. This bug was reported Sep 26 and fixed somewhere around Dec 21. That is a three month waiting for a bug that is so serious that it makes one of the best opensource applications, useless. Now, if the OpenOffice team was responsible for packaging OpenOffice for Linux, regardless of which distribution you are using, they would be proud of their product, and nobody would have to wait three months.
I'm not saying the Ubuntu team are doing a bad job, in fact, I believe that Ubuntu is the best distribution ever, but it's a lot of work packaging the world for all your users, there are bound to take some time to fix some problem. If the same problem had occurred in the Windows build of OpenOffice, it would have been fixed quickly by the OpenOffice guys themselves and there would be no more problems.
Of course, there are lot's of issues with this. For example, how do you provide binary compatibility between different distributions? How do you install? Debs? RPMS? Mac-like bundles? etc! But I'm sure these problems could be solved if the different distributions would work together. Instead, it's quite clear that no such work is going to happen soon.
After using a Mac for a while, it's quite clear that being able to go directly to the vendor of the application, as opposed to the vendor of the operating system, has a lot of advantages. For Mac there is even a very nice framework to add auto update functionality to every program, giving you automatic updates without needing a central repository like most Linux distributions need. This is called Sparkle.
There is a very nice blog about this titled "Is Ubuntu an operating system?" I do agree with most of what this blog is saying.
In general there are one or several large repositories of pre-packaged software, for your Linux distribution, Ubuntu has theirs, Fedora has theirs, OpenSuse has theirs, etc. Apart from the obvious double work being done by packaging the same application for different distributions, this also gives other problems.
One very clear example is a very serious bug that made OpenOffice useless under Ubuntu Edgy. This bug was reported Sep 26 and fixed somewhere around Dec 21. That is a three month waiting for a bug that is so serious that it makes one of the best opensource applications, useless. Now, if the OpenOffice team was responsible for packaging OpenOffice for Linux, regardless of which distribution you are using, they would be proud of their product, and nobody would have to wait three months.
I'm not saying the Ubuntu team are doing a bad job, in fact, I believe that Ubuntu is the best distribution ever, but it's a lot of work packaging the world for all your users, there are bound to take some time to fix some problem. If the same problem had occurred in the Windows build of OpenOffice, it would have been fixed quickly by the OpenOffice guys themselves and there would be no more problems.
Of course, there are lot's of issues with this. For example, how do you provide binary compatibility between different distributions? How do you install? Debs? RPMS? Mac-like bundles? etc! But I'm sure these problems could be solved if the different distributions would work together. Instead, it's quite clear that no such work is going to happen soon.
After using a Mac for a while, it's quite clear that being able to go directly to the vendor of the application, as opposed to the vendor of the operating system, has a lot of advantages. For Mac there is even a very nice framework to add auto update functionality to every program, giving you automatic updates without needing a central repository like most Linux distributions need. This is called Sparkle.
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