Well, blame English. It sucks (and so do all other natural languages).
In software, I'd say that "simple" has come to mean "lack of complexity" rather than "easy". Presumably, the distribution's target audience is software enthusiasts of some sort.
In software, I'd say that "simple" has come to mean "lack of complexity" rather than "easy". Presumably, the distribution's target audience is software enthusiasts of some sort.
If someone gave me a "simple" API for say networking. I would expect the API to be easy to use. But by your definition, I could give you an API such as "write(byte[])" which just puts bytes on the ethernet wire or into on the wifi radio. It's simple! It's not complex, there's only one API method with only one argument!
But in reality, I'm just shifting complexity to the user. I only consider things simple if they truly reduce complexity rather than if they just shift the complexity to someone else.