4 ms·

Here's one suggestion: adopt the drag & drop software installation model of OSX.

• lovskogen 17y ago
  Yeah, desktop linux sucks at installing apps.
• cookiecaper 17y ago
  There's no reason this couldn't be done now, someone just needs to implement that in PackageKit and it would work fine on many distros and package managers. The backend and everything is all there, just make a drag and drop event instead of clicking an "Install" button. That said, installation of software on Linux has been one its shining points for a long time. Package management is awesome and neither OS X or Windows offer it.
  • coffeeaddicted 17y ago
    Some package management (apt) would be better if it would be easier for 3rd party vendors to get into the sources.list. For now you either have to get users to edit that file by hand (for which they might not even have the rights) or you have to use another installation mechanism which avoids the package management to which they are used and lose the advantages of stuff like upgrade. Maybe there should be a sources.list per user which allows normal users also to install software and distros could be set-up to work with a certain file-type in a way that if you click it on the web, then a default installer goes up which guides you all the way through the installation. Right now the situation is that if you want anything that's not in the "official" package repositories (probably the majority of software ...) you are getting into a world where installation is harder than in any other OS. And that is true as well for open-source applications (you want newest blender or one that is months behind?) as closed-source applications (which simply don't get into official repositories anyway). I also tried using one of the binary installers for a while, but when it stopped working with newer distros (my application still worked) I guessed that tar.gz and zip are for the moment simply the best I can really offer and that's still what I'm using for now.
    • peter_severin 17y ago
      On Ubuntu there is a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ directory and files included there are automatically loaded by apt. Google Chrome uses this mechanism and it seems to work well. You install the .deb package manually the first time and then the package manager will update it automatically. I thought that this solution was really great when I saw it.
• hristov 17y ago
  Don't agree. Installation of distribution supported software on linux is very easy already. Drag and drop will just cause a lot of issues with software that actually requires more complicated installation, as well as libraries, etc.
  • coffeeaddicted 17y ago
    That is pretty much the problem. The only software that installs easy (in most cases) is the "distribution supported software" (in the version(s) currently used by the distribution that is).
  • protomyth 17y ago
    I guess one of the questions to answer about ease of installation is what makes Linux software different from the majority of OS X software. [note] OS X does have a package format for more complicated stuff