Wiith Gentoo linux (my favorite) all you do is: # emerge program_name It's actually much, much easier than installing something in Windows. --opm8
I don't think most human can do that. More than half of world population cannot even use keyboard. Some people cannot even find Terminal. Sometimes the simplest copy-n-paste task is clueless to newbies. I know because I used to work as an computer administrator in a company. Everyday, employees rang and asked me to do the simpliest tasks for them. You should distiguish ordinary users who use word, excel, powerpoint, and email from the power users who can configure their own computers. You can't just throw "a list of command" for ordinary users to execute.
I'm talking in a general way, not just refer to my experience with Linux. Most people like doing simple thing in a simple way, not to bug them with a full page of instruction just install software.
I think that's a misconception that is increasingly changing as the populous becomes more informed. There are distros for the customized minded, and now, many that are indeed as simple as "plug n play".
Then show me a distro which I can install most applications without bugging with shell script or terminal.
I can't offer any since I jumped in head first a few months ago with gentoo, the most customizable distro. But I'm sure someone will offer some of the names that are available; for those who would not be able to work with the command line at times.
Thanks anyway I hope there is such a distro I can recommend it to my friends. Hey, there are a lot of people here who need free OS.
So which is more difficult: # apt-get install some_package or typing in some wierd activation key ? Even worse having to ring up MS and waste a substantial amount of time obtaing an activation key.
If I may add, Between 1990 and 1995 they were nowhere in development tools. They had an unimpressive kind of assembler for their DOS and they sported MSBasic. BTW, their Basic also came from a cheap buyout ot some kind of a startup company - Basic itself existed since about 1960 (Darthmoore U - GE?). Borland was the absolute leader in IDE integrated development tools, C, later C++. MS started up a frantic effort and cobbled their 'Visual' tools together with their infamous ubiquitous MFC, patterned after Borland. Another frantic catchup was in Internet. Chairman Bill had failed to see its importance. This finally gave us Internet Explorer craftily intertwined within their NT and under scrutiny in the antitrust case. One other aspect is the dumbness of people like IBM, DEC and Sun to grasp anything at all about opportunities lying ahead in the market. IBM gave the microprocessor software development to M$ for IBM DOS and later the infamous OS2. Sun sold a lot of overpriced hardware to the eager subsidized university crowd without bothering about much else and profiting from the low cost availability of Bell Labs' UNIX. Much later they got riveted by M$'s success and tried to clone some kind of MSOffice/MSWindows solution running on Sun boxes. They worked hard on it but it never came to anything useful. They also started later work on their UNIX clone: Solaris and the Java approach. BTW, Java, often presented as open source is in fact tightly controlled by Sun. OpenOffice is another remainder of the earlier fixation of Sun with MSOffice - also tightly controlled by Sun. DEC, an even much shinier early knight than Sun got unceremoniously gobbled up by iron box maker Compaq. Later hp bought them to the regret of many hp insiders. Interesting to know is that M$ got its NT from what remained at the West Coast from DEC. They hired a group of high powered software developers working on a new future DEC OS and put these to work on NT. Is IBM any wiser today? They just sold their PC business to China. We'll see. You know, China is very hot on Linux, they apparently hate monopolists.