Yes of course I'm concerned about out of date packages. For example, my Fedora machine at work only has packages for Firefox 3.5. I tried using the tarball from

Yes of course I'm concerned about out of date packages. For example, my Fedora machine at work only has packages for Firefox 3.5. I tried using the tarball from firefox's home page, but for whatever reason it was really unstable. I don't think it is unreasonable to expect to be able to install the latest version of such a major open source product as Firefox without hassle. I don't know what you mean by the Windows/OSX update hell. Perhaps you mean the lack of a centralized place to look for updates. Here I agree that the situation is less than ideal, but I wouldn't call it hell. I'm sure the situation can be solved without relying on a centralized repository of all software. The way Chrome does it may be the best option. Too bad it's not used by more projects. The main thing I want is a clear separation between the core platform and the applications. Then the platform vendor can focus on the platform and the application developers can focus on their applications.