> The split between package vendor and package maintainer has classically been the primary reason for malware being rare on Linux.
It's also one of the reasons users and proprietary software have been rare on Linux.
It's also one of the reasons users and proprietary software have been rare on Linux.
It's also one of the reasons users and proprietary software have been rare on Linux.
It may be why proprietary software is lagging, but I think most users prefer an OS level package manager. They just didn't know about them until the Appstore.
The Appstore works on phones and tablets because they are primarily consumption-only devices, and because users are not given any other choice (also, the installer/uninstaller model has a lot of its own suck). I don't know about you, but that's not what I want out of personal computing.
Nobody is complaining that applications are in a central location.
The Linux kernel is everywhere thanks to Torvalds (overly late in the opinions of some BSD devs) declaring the API/ABI sacrosanct, and holding the other kernel developers to that (much to the chagrin of some that want to do hail mary changes for sake of security or ego).
But the userspace above had been reimplemented again and again because the various libs and such are fundamentally unstable. In far too many cases you can even do a x.y.z+1 update without getting some kind of breakage.
Often because someone decided that spec adherence was more important than real life stability, and thus pushed a patch through that altered the API behavior to be more in line with a spec that nobody had complained about for a decade or more.
Edit: I have no idea why you think this is condescending.
Edit response: It is condescending because it imagines the user is incapable or uninterested in the way their system actually works, as a mere pusher of buttons to make the blinkenlights go. Sure, some users are like that, but largely it is a convenient excuse to dismiss criticism.
The installer/uninstaller paradigm is almost as bad as the package manager paradigm in my opinion.
The market share of any PC desktop operating system has mostly to do with the type of office work that took place in the 90s, when computers took over.
That's slowly changing as the web is taking over, and Chromebooks, Android, Mac, and "regular" Linux desktops becomes a viable platform for sharing your work with others.
Consider that the usecase for a personal desktop computer may be different from that of a smartphone or tablet. There's more to personal computing than a web browser.
Of course an easier to use third party packing system would make the desktop easier to use, but that's not where the pain points are. (Especially since most third party binary packaged software is just something you unpack and run.)
Even the most easy to use packaging system you could imagine wouldn't impact the Linux desktop market share measurably.
Historical reasons like it being an open platform that developers could target without the requirement of third party approval, among other strengths.
Linux doesn't have anything like that traditionally. You have to make a deb, rpm, whatever Gentoo uses, etc. And ./configure && make && make install is laughably unintuitive.
Also, Google have done some serious work to ensure at least some backwards compatibility (and providing a support library, that i fail to recall the exact name of, for backporting various functionality).
While the FOSS world seems to lean on "compile it" along with "lacking resources" as an excuse for not maintaining anything more than incidental compatibility across releases.