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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

>The Software Center... [is] far better than what's available on Windows at the moment

I agree on this, though not everything that can or should be installed on Ubuntu comes through the Software Center or even as a .deb or apt repo. For things outside of this, a .exe file on Windows has the upper hand. .exe (or .msi) is a Windows universal. .deb and .rpm are not Linux universals.

>Installers can block each other on Windows as well. This point just seems like nit-picking.

And it's frustrating. You will notice I said "it has to be better than 'better than Windows'", because "better than Windows" still means "learning something other than Windows".

I use Ubuntu. I like it. I'm excited to see where they're going. I'm one of the seemingly few people who don't condemn Canonical for their tight-fisted control over their system. But this article is flawed, and I think throwing some constructive criticism into the mix would be helpful.

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>And it's frustrating.

Absolutely, on any system. I'll admit I swear every now and again when I get caught trying to run apt-get with synaptic open on another workspace.

>You will notice I said "it has to be better than 'better than Windows'", because "better than Windows" still means "learning something other than Windows".

I agree. I guess I'm guilty of accepting a limitation because it's commonplace. I assume overcoming that limitation on Ubuntu/any system using apt would be extremely technically challenging and given the few times it occurs it's not a priority.

Chunk any overly long install queues and set the requested package to check for dependencies and add itself to the next chunk, after the current chunk is processed.

Does any package manager do something like this? I can't think of any linux package managers that allows simultaneous installs or updates.

'Software Manager' on Mint queues installs so that you can choose and set things to install with it while it is installing stuff. A few of the simplified package managers do this now. Not sure if any do intelligent chunking or integrate particularly well with the standard update utility yet.

It needs improvement, sure, but I still don't see it as a UX killer, especially when compared to most commercial install and update systems.

Eh, .deb may as well be a "universal"--I have not found any packages online that were packaged for Linux without a .deb file. They always either have a .deb or only provide the source for Linux users. Now, they sometimes don't even have an .rpm file, which is a little annoying on Fedora, but that's a different story. And, of course, they almost never have any other packages, but that's only to be expected--anybody using a non-deb, non-rpm distro can very probably fend for themselves. And, these days, I think only a small minority of new users choose distros other than Ubuntu, so supporting .rpm files is also less important.

Also, is installing a file at the same time as doing an update really a big feature? I've never even wanted it on Linux and I don't think I ever used it on Windows either.

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