[ale] Linux for "normal" people?

[Jay Loden]

I might be misunderstanding you, but what do you mean by:

> APT are fine for maintaining existing packages, but they really don't
> help with finding new ones and installing them or with dealing with
> things that aren't packaged as either a .deb or RPM. 

That's precisely what I use apt-get for, installing new software...when I want 
a piece of software, such as openoffice, I go to a konsole (I dont use 
synaptic, but I could, if I wanted a gui) and type:

 "apt-get install openoffice"

and then I have open office, and any dependencies, installed after a few 
minutes of downloading.  I wont argue that this obviously doesnt help with 
stuff that doesnt have a package, of course. :)

On Mandrake, urpmi is extremely similar, and has the added bonus that if you 
download an rpm, you can double click the rpm file in the gui and it will 
install it for you, nice and neat, and check dependencies for you as well. 

That's exactly why I give my family and friends Mandrake, because it has a 
nice gui for installing/searching for/removing/updating packages, and a large 
selection of packages on the net.  If the software doesn't have a package, 
well, that's a whole nother ball of wax.  

With urpmi you can also search for applications by their description, title, 
filename, etc. or just browse by category, so finding software (i.e. user 
wants to find a wordprocessor) isn't bad at all. This also addresses your 
concept of "suites" because you can install an entire category of 
applications, or a section thereof, like the "koffice" section, and get all 
the koffice apps, etc. 

-Jay


On Tuesday 16 November 2004 12:29 pm, Michael Mealling wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-11-16 at 12:06, Nathan J. Underwood wrote:
> > I downloaded the ubuntu live cd and have been tinkering with it.  The
> > first thing that I noticed was that it seemed to be a bit faster than
> > knoppix.  The second thing I noticed was that it had a very clean and
> > easy to use 'feel' to it.  I've not had the time to do an install yet,
> > but if the install version is like the live cd, I may have found a new
> > distro that I'll be using for *normal* people.
>
> I've found most 'normal' people are able to grok most of linux but the
> largest issue seems to be package management. Sure, things like Yum and
> APT are fine for maintaining existing packages, but they really don't
> help with finding new ones and installing them or with dealing with
> things that aren't packaged as either a .deb or RPM. That's why Gentoo
> looked interesting for a few minutes.
>
> 'normal' people want painless (that doesn't mean 'intelligent')
> application (not 'package') management. Some things that I think
> packages need on linux to enable this:
>
> * the concept of package 'suites' (i.e. a suite contains all "office"
> apps such as Open Office, Dia, etc)
>
> * package aliases so I don't have to know _exactly_ what the package is
> called before I can get it with yum or apt-get. I've had to go find the
> rpm in order to query it for its name before I can tell yum to install
> it and its dependencies.
>
> * A _standard_ way for CVS checkouts, source tarballs and binary
> tarballs to co-exist with RPM and APT...
>
> Sorry.... just venting a little...
>
> -MM
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale