I'm going to reply to the comments of toadlife and Shawn. No personal offence intended, just by me quoting you, quoting just makes it easier to reply point by point.
It's a common argument that Linux is needlessly complicated when trying to install things. The problem with this argument is that it's not a problem with Linux as an OS, it's a problem with lazy ass programmers who make software for Linux.
hmm, not with you so far, but i will suspend judgment...
Most software for Linux must be installed by compiling the code yourself
ah ah ahh! this is 100% not true (well 90%, you did say "mostly" after all). It is totally possible, and advisable never to install anything from source, if you are using (again, advisable to do this) something like suse, red hat, one of the debians, slackware, whatever big name you can think of. You can almost always apt, slapt-get or urpmi anything you want, and if you set your repositories up right, it's a simple one liner, with no configuration, or searching for dependencies. Even if you do have to install an rpm, deb or tgz you can solve the dependencies with urpmi, apt, whatever much easier than finding the sources and installing them yourself. If you install from sources, you take the hardest way, by far, and there is no need to do this.
(which can take upwards of hours), then installing using a command that's 10 line long. Why do programmers do this? Why is it so god damn hard to install most Linux software? Mozilla and Opera for Linux are simple binary programs that install much like Windows programs.
actually you'd do better to use the rpm of opera, i would say, and the binary installer of firefox has always given me problems compared with the (at the moment) standard method of untarring it into /opt and creating a symlink in /usr/local/bin, in fact i hate those self installing binaries, your rpm database has no way of tracking them for a start.
It takes almost no time and it's so easy that my grandma can probably do it.
we will have to disagree, see above. actually, sorry, for all i know, your grandma might be fine with untarring and making a symlink.
We know that Linux can be made easy; easy to install programs already exist.
yep, all rpms, debs and slackpacks, along with their respective net-based package and dependency manager programs, i have just mentioned these.
Is there any foreseeable reason for programmers to only release the source, make you compile it yourself, then make you install it using a command that can't even fit on one line?
there is a very good reason for programmers to only release the source. they probably only have one machine they develop on. releasing the source is a lot more helpful than releasing binaries for their personal machine. also, GPL software (and some others) requires you to release your sources, and a lot of software is bound by these licences. If the source is released, it is likely that binaries will be compiled by people who own other machines (like the contributed binaries that IBM always make available of mozilla for OS/2, or the various gaim versions at gaim.org) and everybody's happy. Any half decent project will have its own webpage with sources and binaries available. mplayer is the only real exception i can think of, but mplayer binaries are in a lot of apt repositories nowadays, and you can yast2 it on suse even. also, the mplayer site is incredibly good even though it doesn't have binaries, and they are right, you will probably get more bang for your buck if you compile mplayer properly yourself.
Yes, it is the fault of 'linux'. When I say 'linux', I mean the 500 distros of GNU/linux that are available.
then you are already terminally confused. "linux" is an operating system kernel. those distributions you mention are individual operating systems, they are maintained and distributed by many different enterprises, organisations and individuals. There is a difference. hint: the kernel is not to blame for non-kernel software
The problem is none of the various distros like to follow any sort of standard,
a fair point, although it ignores all the things i mentioned above, apt and so on, which i think addresses these issues adequately.
which makes it a fucking pain to write and installer that will work on any distro.
here i agree with you, and that's what i was saying above. developers: release source, other people, contribute binaries and maintain package repositories.
Some linux distros follow the LSB, but most don't. As a result, most binary installers for linux will only support a few major distros. If you look at KDE.org for example, you will see that they only have binaries for a select few distributions fopr their newest releases. This is because of what I described above.
again, this will improve with time. LSB compliance will become more widespread.
Even as a user of FreeBSD, I have to deal with the hell that is cross-linux-distro incompatibility. I'm writing a HowTo on getting America's Army to work on FreeBSD, and the hardest part, BY FAR, is getting the proper set of linux libraries installed that support the damn game. If every linux distro followed the LSB, we wouldn't have to have eight different linux bases in the FreeBSD ports tree to choose from.
oh woe is me. so your beef with linux is just that you're pissed off that you can't get away from it, even though you use *BSD? now you know how linux users feel about ms windows. tell you what, why not compile your game from source, that'll fix the problem! :-D
Don't blame the programmers. It's not their fault.
oh, ok.
