[ale] Linux for "normal" people?

[Michael Mealling]

On Tue, 2004-11-16 at 13:28, Jay Loden wrote:
> 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. :)

Yes, but users don't think in terms of 'packages'. In the community we
equate 'packages' with discrete components that in many cases aren't
'applications'. I.e. libgail-gnome-1.0.2-2 isn't an application. We can
see why you'd need that but a 'normal' user is going to pull their hair
out over what that might do and why they'd need it. The user should
never see that package because they should be given an 'application'
only view. 

> 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. 

That's a good first step, but it requires Mandrake to create metadata
about each package for which 'topic' it fits into, which 'applications'
its part of, etc. That's an area where we need a cross-distro standard.