Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey 499
tim1980 writes "Derek Croxton has written a rather long editorial on how he sees the Linux and Open Source communities, and his personal experiences with Linux, the editorial is titled Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey and is over 3,500 words. Excerpt: 'A novice's greatest fear is sitting in front of a motionless command prompt with no idea what to type; or, as so frequently happens, knowing a command that he copied verbatim from a document discovered on the internet somewhere, but with no idea of what it means or how to alter it if it doesn't behave exactly as advertised.'"
Re:.so hell (Score:3, Insightful)
Please.... (Score:4, Insightful)
$command --help
man $command
info $command
http://www.google.com/search?q=$command
use brain;
Re:Please.... (Score:5, Insightful)
$how do i read a file from my floppy? "mount?" who woulda thought.
The problem is knowing where to look sometimes. I am still learning useful commands.
symphony OS (Score:3, Insightful)
mad as xxxx and staggeringly heavy on disk space but it takes the problem away.
Re:Education. (Score:3, Insightful)
and even if you know the command: man man
man, version 1.5k
usage: man [-adfhktwW] [section] [-M path] [-P pager] [-S list]
[-m system] [-p string] name
uau... much better now
Admit it: cli is not for joe average that only needs to change its pc configuration once in a decade. Even if he learns something, he will forget everything in a couple of months
Re:Please.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Knowing these tricks assumes that you've already had some experience with command-line interfaces. I'm sorry, but none of the examples above are common sense to anyone without command-line experience (except maybe the Google search).
Re:symphony OS (Score:3, Insightful)
Lost in Linuxland (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, most user friendly distros will manage a forehead install [wordspy.com], but invarably there will be at least one critical function that doesn't work. In my experience that has been Palm hotsync (always), printing over the Windows network (usually), and wireless networking (most recently).
I know from hard experience that trying to find a solution for any of these will involve hours if not days of trolling newsgroups, forums, and that special hell called man pages.
I'm not afraid of command prompts, or of learning new things, but I simply cannot afford to waste a whole day trying to print, or sync my calendar.
Re:hmmm ... what shall i try now? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that next time he RTFM
No, he probably never installed Linux again, and influenced countless friends and business associates not to try it, because it was unstable and unsupported. Seriously.
Re:.so hell (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now wouldn't it be nice if a standard were made and users could be assured that, for the most part, regardless of what distribution they're using:
Of course, every time I bring up the idea of standardizing important parts of Linux distributions the lynch mob comes after me, because consistency and distribution-neutral package installation goes against the spirit of Open Source or something ("stifles choice", I've heard).
I mean, wouldn't it be nice to tell someone "just use apt-get and do X, Y, and Z" instead of "[Install Debian] and use apt-get to do X, Y, and Z"?
Re:hmmm ... what shall i try now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would he want to try Linux again after that?
The problem with making Linux mainstream, is that there WILL be new people. And you're going to have to play nice with them or they'll go right back to Windows.
Re:Lost in Linuxland (Score:5, Insightful)
But once you're set up, you're set up for good. You can't afford to "waste a whole day", but it's not like you are going to have to "waste a whole day" every day, just once. It is called "learning".
Re:Education. (Score:5, Insightful)
What man is missing is an example section, e.g., "To find all files with mary in the title, use ls -R *mary*" or whatever; "to find all files modified in the last 10 days do..."
I will say right out that perhaps such a facility exists, but I am unaware. I am a GUI user of Linux (SuSE 9.1 X86_64) and my command line skills have rusted since I lived in VMS 20 years ago...
Where has this guy been? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, perhaps the author has inadvertantly drawn attention to the heart of Linux's adoption woes: documentation. Why doesn't this author know about apt-get? Why doesn't he know about urpmi? Why isn't he aware of the vast amount of documentation normally available in /usr/share/docs/ ?
The common answers people receive for this are:
But to even adept computer users (not uber geeks, just adept) the location of "the manual" isn't obvious, they don't know about */docs and, lets face it, man pages are written FGBG (for geeks, by geeks).
In comparison to it's top two competitors, linux is the only OS to date where a user is expected to magically know the location of appropriate documentation, by default have a degree in the documentation jargon of advanced coders, and to be willing to read a small novel on the intricacies of his particular distro's package and system management methods to even use the os to any degree of efficiency.
This is what people mean when they say Linux isn't ready *yet* and to tie it back to the article, these are exactly the sort of apparently groundless complaints that surface as a result of this gaping hole in useability.
Re:hmmm ... what shall i try now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or he will just give up on Linux and stick to Windows. Because all Linux users are a bunch of Jirks anyways. I see RTFM. that is the most useless sort of help anyone can give. How about at least poining them to the correct spot in the manual. A lot of times the reason nubes have so much problems with the manual is that they don't have the proper understainging of the way things work so while their brains are trying to make sence of all these forgen commands "rm" "Redo Mount", "Revese memory", "release mount" "remove" then you mix a buch of forgen symboles to the mix \ / ? * . They never seen these things before. So the rm -rf / could logicaly mean to someone who has never seen the command "Restore Machiene" with options Remove Files and the / could mean something about temp files. Who knows if you didn't know that / is your root directory heck when I was a newbee when they told me go to my root directory I did a cd
If you were not able to help him redirect him to a better channel more targeted towards noobies. because doing crap like that only makes them more fustrated and dislike linux.
Re:Please.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that it wouldn't kill someone to make a bunch of tutorials that speak to average people, and explain things like rm, and ls
Man, How I Hate Thee, Let me Count the Ways (Score:2, Insightful)
Check out the description of the tool:
"find searches the directory tree rooted at each given file name by evaluating the given expression from left to right, according to the rules of precedence (see section OPERATORS), until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for and operations, true for or), at which point find moves on to the next file name."
Do you imagine that most users would know what on earth that meant? Why not at least prepend it with "This tool enables you to find files"? Then give one or two examples of common usage? _Then_ by all means bombard them with the myriad of possible parameters.
P.
Re:Please.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Imagine you boarded an alien ship with a computer system you'd never seen before, built only for the technicians on the alien ship. So, this is a specialized, purpose-built system. All the alien techs like the system, because it's easy for them to quickly get something done. You, however, have a huge problem with it, because it doesn't do "natural language" (whose language?) processing, or "know what you want" and it isn't a "good desktop."
What my point is, is your complaint is misplaced. It has a place against microsoft, because microsoft is designing its product -for- desktop and home use. As such, if it fails in some regard, you have a reason to complain, generally.
However, linux is a hobby project shared between a group of people who love it for some very real reasons. This is a very large group, but it's not dissociated, supporters share a common philosophical and technical interest in the project and its goals (like designing your software code with practical guidelines and considerations, for instance, having no artificial limits).
I use linux as my primary system. I have my fair share of problems with it, but I respect the fact that I am not the target of this project. I can share in the benefits of using the system, and someday I may be able to contribute to it, but right now, I just appreciate the fact that the system functions exactly as I've (maybe unwittingly) told it to, with no arbitrary limits.
Re:From TFA (Score:3, Insightful)
That's sad, and very if I may add.
When I started on linux (slack, then redhat at that time, it took me a few years to land and stick to debian) so when started most of help came from friends who begun earlier and they gave me lots of help and guidence which convinced me even further that linux didn't just come with a style that I loved from the first day, but also with a bunch'a helping fellas and a great community.
And this (fortunately) followed me since then. At times when I had to discover stuff by myself were challenging, but I always enjoyed every bit of it from making hardware work to scripting exotics and on.
I guess not all you out there were so lucky
But linux wasn't started to be a lame-proof clicking gui for solitaire playing illiterates. That's a fact. Since then very very very many people got computers and many of them think they are gurus, which they aren't, but at least they complain all the way about things they find hard to be accustomed to.
Like command line interfaces. Which in linux is a gift from god. Hell it _is_ linux. What "they" wish to click upon all the time are just a covering cloth, which many of out there like too, but know that it wasn't what made linux strong (using past tense because nowadays that is changing to a very good direction). It can bring more users (as it does), but hopefully they will seee the great benefits also which lay behind the eyecandy and which is the real and main advantage of linux and co.
There's one thing I always tell and I feel I can't repeat it enough times: don't like it, don't use it, choose something else, because you can (!) which is a very good thing.
That's all folks, keep linux
Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the apt-get approach is that it's like living in a town with only one supermarket. OK, so it's a really big supermarket but still:
- If you can't find the food you want in there, you're stuck
- If you can but it's stale, damaged or out of stock, you're stuck
- You are totally dependent on the people running the supermarket
- The larger a supermarket is, the harder it becomes to find things in it. Just imagine taking your grandma to a supermarket where the aisles stretched as far as the eye could see!
To stretch the analogy a bit further than it can really go, just imagine if getting tired of this one supermarket you travelled to the next town and bought a lampshade from a shop there. Bring it all the way back, put it in your house and suddenly your TV explodes.
What happened? "Oh, you mixed different repositories". All centralised systems suffer this but Fedora worse than most - you're fine as long as you stick to the core repositories but if you add others (and you do need to do that, if you want a big enough collection to be useful) things will randomly break due to "conflicts". Just imagine trying to explain that to grandma!
Oh yeah. There are a bunch of other problems as well. I've seen a lot of 3rd party packages of software that are totally broken. Often the users don't connect the problems they are seeing with the packages. This happens a lot with complex software like Wine, Mono etc ... I've seen quite a few packages of Wine that won't even start! It's pretty clear that many 3rd party packagers hardly test what they produce at all, especially in the case of "new release, I'll just bump the number in the spec and rebuild". I'd estimate that about 40-50% of the tech support problems I deal with in Wine are due to incorrectly built packages. It's not even hard! Just configure, make, make install but people still cock it up mightily - using badly done wrapper scripts and moving files around from where they're supposed to be are the most common, but bad builds happen too.
Apt-get has other problems. You have to duplicate this huge effort over and over again for each distro. This doesn't happen so you get vendor lockin - the very thing we're trying to all get away from, no? I've met more than one person in my life whos number 1 reason for using Debian was "I can apt get lots of software". It was not due to the merits of the distribution itself, it was not due to have a nice installer, slick default desktop, solid PAM setup etc etc. It was because installing software was not a pain in the ass.
Apt-get works great as long as you are willing to throw infinite manpower at the problem. We don't have infinite manpower, duh. So centralised packaging cannot be a scalable, sustainable way forward for our community outside of certain use cases like servers (where it works well).
Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME! (Score:3, Insightful)
How about Slackware? SuSE? Yellowdog? Gentoo? Redhat 6?
See the pattern? You still haven't given a general "how to install packages" guide that works on _Linux_ in general. You're still talking about a subset of Linux distributions.
2.) If you want that, it's easily done with a few config file edits.
Care to list them? And would it be too bold an assumption on my part to expect that these files all exist in the same location and have the same format? If not, these "config file edits" will only be valid for a small subset of distributions.
But that's beside the point. Why should I have to edit config files to do install packages? Looks like this "simple guide to installing packages" is quickly spiraling out of control.
3.) I can't remember the last time I couldn't find an RPM.
Do you mean an RPM for your (I presume popular) distribution? Or did you mean an RPM that could work on pretty much any distribution?
Re:Lost in Linuxland (Score:3, Insightful)
Ohh come on people, this guy is a dufas. (Score:3, Insightful)
He says "On Linux, you single click to run a program." "On Linux, when you double click the title bar, the window shades instead of min/maximize." WTF?! What does he mean "On Linux"? On Mandrake, SuSE, and any other machine with KDE, these options aren't default. Did he write this in 1994?
Bah, with a whole article filled with this crap, I don't know how anyone could take him seriously.
Re:Fear? (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember sitting in front of a DEC or UNIX machine when I was younger a not knowing at all what to do. I had teachers to help me, and books to learn, so I am not so afraid anymore. I remember sitting in front of the first mac confused. I looked stuff up, and used prior experience, and figured it out.
My mom OTHOH gets confused when the GUI rules change slightly. She has no basis on which to explore such machines. Frankly the complexity of Windows is just overwhenliming. It might be better to give her a list of command line instructions. The things done would be much less fancy, but at least she would get them done.
A lot got done with training in the linear-text-mode-driven world. I do think GUI let more poeple use computer, as well as justifing faster more expensive machines. I mostly work on a GUI. I do think, however, that one of the great fallacies of our time is that a GUI is all that is needed to get a user computerized. Just look at how much money is quoted for training when switching a user from one GUI to another, even if both are renditions of MS Windows.
Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME! (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, if you're ranting in this vein, it's because you haven't yet become comfortable with Linux in general (to subvert your term) to the point where you understand the bigger picture. I could whine all day about the various and sundry differences between Windows versions too...but most folks would find it silly, because we've all got a decade or more of Windows in general experience, so the fact that "Dialup Networking" might be found in 3 different places over the years seems quite trivial. And it is. But what you don't recognize is that to someone who has a good working understanding of and familiarity with Linux in general the differences between the Mandrake package manager and the Fedora one are pretty much that same level of trivial. And if you aren't scared of the command line, apt-get, emerge, yum, and urpmi all end up seeming roughly equivalent, and it isn't much trouble to use any one of them. To someone who has been running Linux for a few years, picking up a new distro isn't any real challenge. (Well, unless it's Linux from Scratch or something ;-)
My point is that once again, people are viewing Linux through Windows-trained eyes. Computer systems have differences, even within families that are similar. Since pretty much anyone who works with computers at all has years of Windows experience these days, people know how to work around the annoyances, and compensate for the differences. When someone gets thrown into the world of Linux, they tend to try out 6 different distros in 6 months...is it really a surprise that minor differences would seem much more serious when you have so little experience with the family of systems in general?
Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME! (Score:3, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's really only Redhat and Debian that have large sets of packages, right?
Ok, I'm going to correct you, because you're wrong. Gentoo, Mandrake, SuSE, Lindows, Xandros, and probably lots more distros have truly massive package collections. I use Gentoo primarily, and there are thousands of ebuilds out there; the only things I've installed without using emerge were little obscure scripts and such which aren't typically packaged at all beyond source.
Also, if you want the ultimate Linux in general installation procedure, here it is:
tar -xvzf foo.tar.gz
./configure
cd foo
make
make install
Source tarballs aren't as scary as people make them out to be...and they typically work across distributions.
Re:Where has this guy been? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Linux's adoption woes: documentation. Why doesn't this author know about
> apt-get? Why doesn't he know about urpmi? Why isn't he aware of the vast
> amount of documentation normally available in
Perhaps the author did not RTFM? The following is addressed to all computer novices everywhere:
I don't expect you to magically know about the 'man' command. I don't expect you to randomly chance upon
The 'M' that I expect you to be capable of reading is your DISTRIBUTION'S MANUAL.
Let's say you installed Debian. Why the hell aren't you looking at http://www.debian.org/doc/? This is the place where you _learn_ about man, info,
Redhat? http://www.redhat.com/docs/.
Mandrake? http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/fdoc.php3
FreeBSD? http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html
And so on. You managed to find an ISO for a Linux distribution, how can it be so difficult to follow the links on the web site to the distro's documentation?
What's that you say, you bought it in a box at a shop? What's that strange thing, why yes, it looks like a... book, with the words MANUAL or DOCUMENTATION printed on it?
I wouldn't expect you to be able to configure a network on Windows or the Mac OS without consulting the documentation. Why do you expect to be able to do the same on Linux?
Re:isn't this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:unix' learning curve is vertical (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, but you can do pretty well by the RTFM method, and using "tar xvzf file.tar.gz" until you discover that you really want to learn what each of those letters means. By then you'll find yourself wanting to use the man pages, because it tells you about all kinds of other nifty stuff you never knew about.
I find all kinds of useful stuff in man pages all the time. Hell, they're oftentimes more useful than all the newbie-friendly documentation on the web. The difference is that each level of information is ideal for a different level of user. Start with web & HowTo docs, then move to less specific HowTo docs, then go to manpages. It's not that hard; it just takes time.
Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME! (Score:3, Insightful)
You just can't get over wanting it to be just like Windows. That's your own problem, not Linux's. In particular, you're stuck to the software model where you go "get an installer and run it." That's really not the model most Linux distributions use at all, and in my opinion and that of a lot of people who use Linux, it's an inferior model to boot. Instead, most Linux distributions manage your software for you. You don't go download a Fedora RPM on Gentoo, because that would be silly. It doesn't matter that it wouldn't work (and by the way, lots of packages would work fine)....why would you ever want to do that when you could just use one command and have Gentoo use the Gentoo package? It just doesn't matter whether a package works from one distribution to the next...just use the package manager that came with your distro, and you'll be just fine.
The point is that we just don't install software the way Windows people do. But our way is extremely powerful, and once you're comfortable with it, it's actually easier than downloading and installing stuff in Windows. And that's true across a very large subset of distributions...pretty much every one that's not unabashedly experts-only.
So just come off it. You clearly don't have the familiarity needed to make these judgements; in fact, your completely uninformed assumption that Fedora and Debian were the only distros with a decent package collection makes me wonder whether you have even used Linux at all...certainly I suspect you haven't used enough distributions for any appreciable length of time to warrant all your whining about how different they all are. You just sound to me like somebody who has a set idea of a problem, and want to come on /. and bitch up a storm about it without even bothering to find out whether it's fixable, or even a real problem.
Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME! (Score:5, Insightful)
If the goal is to have an OS/distro that will compete with Windows and OSX, then the OS/distro will have to accommodate the millions (or Billions, even) who will view Linux through Windows-trained eyes.
I spent months following wickedly obscure and time consuming instructions for compiling apps for Mandrake before I discovered the magic of the MCC gui for URPMI, then another couple months finding reliable mirrors.
Now, when a new version of my favorite app come out I have to wait until someone comes along to make an rpm for me, but when the same app releases an update for Windows, all I gotta do is download and click Next a few times. I have seriously broken my Mandrake install trying to install software via means other than URPMI, so I have pretty much quit trying.
Don't tell me to RTFM either, because I have R'd several FM's but they don't help much because of the two dozen different ways the authors and the distros deal with installing software. Although I'm a clueless newbie among the slashdot Gnu/Linux elite, the rest of the world thinks I'm some sort of computer genius. I've been fiddling and reading and making and breaking Linux installs for almost four years now and I still get frustrated with the process.
Meanwhile, my main reason for becoming interested in Linux has evaporated--Windows no longer sucks. In fact, WindowsXP is a pretty darned good OS--better than I could have imagined when suffering with the infernal abomination of WindowsME.
I guess I just get tired of the slashdot mindset that appears every time there is a thread that suggests that maybe just maybe there could be some improvements in the area of user-friendliness of Linux distros. It usually starts with, "Just open a terminal window and..."
The more Unix-y and less Windows-ish or Macintoshy the solution, the longer it will be before any distro makes serious inroads among average users.
I'm willing to spend my hobby time fiddling with and learning about my OS because I have enjoy it, but most people are afraid to click anything they haven't been approved to click.
Re:Please.... (Score:2, Insightful)
At the risk of stating the obvious...it just doesn't matter how productive a 'newbie' is in his first hour or even his first six months. He'll be using a computer all his life, so if he has to invest time to learn a shell or a text editor or whatever, which makes him more productive for the next n years then that will be time well spent. If he doesn't want to make the effort because he has illogical negative feelings about command lines, then why should anyone care? It's his loss.
Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME! (Score:3, Insightful)
2)Your FreeBSD experience doesn't really count either, as it's not Linux...but on the other hand, is there really anything that ports isn't giving you?
3)Are you actually claiming that Red Hat Advanced Server and SuSE 9.1 lack packages for things you need? Or that you have actually experienced serious dependency problems on them? Because I'm not buying that.
It still sounds like you are waging a personal war against package management. If you are out there refusing to use the tools the distros gave you, installing RPMs from a bunch of sources and source tarballs for stuff that you could be installing with a single command, it's not surprising that you run into problems.
All I'm saying is if you actually do run Linux, and you are having these kind of problems, you are really doing something bad wrong. I take care of a bunch of machines on several distributions, I know lots of people who do the same, and neither dependencies nor distribution incompatibilities are live problems. We just don't see them.
Re:Please.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that great? In UNIX it does take a little longer to reach basic competency, compared to windows. But the learning curve doesn't stop there. There's always something new to learn, to give you more control over your machine, and make you more productive. A little time invested reading HOWTOs pays back immensely over time.
Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME! (Score:1, Insightful)
I think the problem is the underlying filesystems heirarchy that the distros use. For example RedHat may install apache binaries under
Why can't the package managers just standardize and say something like "binaries go here, under this standardized heirarchy structure, libs go over here, blah blah blah".... different distros could still do their own specializations, but common files would be standardized. What is wrong with that?
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. The technology is there. The technology is proven. The technology is Open Source.
Unless by "Linux in general" you meant Linus' work on the KERNEL. In which case, this does NOT belong there.
"Not every distribution has the ability to use apt or yum or whatever or even a package system."
So? The people who would choose that kind of distribution KNOW what they are getting and they've chosen it for a REASON.
"Or it may have a package system, but no one has made a decent number of packages for the distribution because it's not as popular as Debian or Fedora."
Again, the people who have chosen that distribution have chosen it for a REASON and they know what they're getting in to.
Seriously, name one non-niche distribution that would not be able to run apt.
"Now wouldn't it be nice if a standard were made and users could be assured that, for the most part, regardless of what distribution they're using:"
It's called a "defacto standard". The LSB has tried to force rules such as that onto everyone and they've failed miserably.
"Of course, every time I bring up the idea of standardizing important parts of Linux distributions the lynch mob comes after me, because consistency and distribution-neutral package installation goes against the spirit of Open Source or something ("stifles choice", I've heard)."
Dude, when someone CORRECTS your MISCONCEPTIONS it is NOT the same as "coming after" you.
"I mean, wouldn't it be nice to tell someone "just use apt-get and do X, Y, and Z" instead of "[Install Debian] and use apt-get to do X, Y, and Z"?"
The problem is that YOU have not looked at ALL the requirements to achieve this.
#1. Centralized naming authority.
Otherwise, different distributions can have different package names. This would include the version numbering schemes and actual file names.
#2. Centralized package content authority.
Once the package and files have been named and versioned correctly, everyone must know what files are in each package. That way, package foo depends upon lib-bar and knows that it is in package bar-utils.
#3. Centralized file hierarchy authority.
What files go where. For all files. Under every circumstance.
Easily done for the MAJORITY of the MOST COMMONLY used apps / libraries / packages / etc.
But that's already working TODAY. As long as you stay with a particular distribution.
What happens when Red Hat includes kernel patches that cause some app to break?
But Debian does not include those kernel patches. So the app works with Debian, but not with Red Hat.
Well, then. That's easy, we have a Central Kernel Authority to rule on what patches are mandated and what patches are illegal.
Great, so we have the unified Linux system.
But then we have lots of development happening in the forks. Illegal kernel patches are loaded and tested and advanced development happens. But the people who want to load the latest stuff will find that it doesn't work because the development stuff is NOT in the scheme of the Central Authority.
So you're back to the original problem. People cannot use apt-get to install really-cool-app-v.0.0.5 because it depends upon a file that isn't available for the distribution they're using.
Just get over it and stick with a distribution.
Re:Education. (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's one example from the FreeBSD find man page:
find / -newer ttt -user wnj -print
Print out a list of all the files owned by user ``wnj'' that are newer than the file ttt.
Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME! (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's not obvious. If a person has a user account on a Linux computer, and is able to place files there, mark them as executable, and run them, then he SHOULD be able to install packages as well.
The user can do the workaround of manually extracting the package with an archiver tool and then moving around the contents to appropriate positions- but there is no good reason to disallow someone from running rpm or dpkg to install programs to ~/bin.
Yeah, right, whatever. (Score:4, Insightful)
Those filthy Linux guys. Always corrupting our grandmothers! I hate them. All of them!
"Oh, I'm sure apt is portable enough to run on anything. You're just forgetting that a repository is also necessary, which only exists for the major distributions."
No, I'm not forgetting it.
I'm asking you for SPECIFICS and you keep coming back with hypothetical cases.
Again, someone who CHOOSES that distribution already KNOWS the limitations and has CHOSEN it for some reason.
Even in a world with a Central Authority controlling the naming of files, the naming of packages, the placement of files and the actions of the installer, that would STILL be a problem.
Simply put, why should the additional functionality of your hypothetical distribution be REQUIRED of all distributions in the perfect world you claim needs to exist?
If it is NOT required, then you are right back to where you are today. Conflicts and all.
"Because Linux zealots seem to believe that a little bit of distribution consistency is the worst possible thing that could happen..."
I guess that's your problem.
You are NOT advocating for "a little bit of distribution consistency".
If you can't see that, you're an idiot. That was why I pointed out all the things needed to achieve your fantasy. The Central Authority for naming all files, all versions, all packages, all the contents of packages, and all the behaviours of the installer.
Not to mention the limitations on what kernel patches are required to be applied (and which are forbidden).
"So in other words, your standard works as long as you confine yourself to a single platform? Some standard."
It's called a "defacto standard".
It works. The process works. Linux advances. Users have options.
Under your solution, MANY of those options would be TAKEN AWAY so that some idiot would be sure that every possible package he could find would run on his machine.
Depends on your point of view... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just how is the above is different than the following:
Just call me curious. Computers are complex machines. Expect to be befuddled once in a while. It's not a cash register that makes change for you when you press the button marked "hamburger".