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Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

Because the assumed knowledge required to understand the procedure under Archlinux is vast compared to that under Windows. Here are the concepts you need to know in order to do the work under Archlinux:

  0. How to load your terminal program
  1. The command line
  2. Permissions/root
  3. Package managers in general
  4. pacman in particular (what, it's not the game?)
  5. Command line switches
  6. Piping
  7. grep
  8. What "looks OK" means in a Linux package description

And that's all assuming you know about MP3s, ripping and what features you need in such a program.

Under Windows, you need to know:

  1. A browser
  2. A search engine
  3. A feel for trustworthiness

In both cases, experience teaches you what you need to know. The necessary experience is much more easily obtained under Windows than Linux, and it's more generally useful in life. So that's why.

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Your overall point is correct, but your "under Windows" example is oversimplified. The Windows user still needs to know:

1) What an "installer" is

2) Where on the filesystem it goes when it's downloaded

3) How to navigate to that location in Explorer

4) That double-clicking the installer runs it

etc.

Some of these are things that you can learn from general Windows usage, but then the same could be said of several of the points you listed under Linux. And there are alternate approaches to installing software in Linux (like Ubuntu's Software Center) that remove the command-line, piping, grep, etc.

Parent's example was Arch Linux, not Ubuntu. And it was oversimplified.

It was totally not oversimplified. That is really exactly how it went when I wanted to backup an audio CD once.

And it is normally simpler, I mean, if you already know the name of the program you want, it's just:

pacman -S gimp

Which is of course just as simple as Ubuntu:

apt-get install gimp

You don't need to know anything except how to confirm a dialog. On IE, you press the download link and about 5 warning dialogs later the software is running. No navigation or double-clicks involved.

The millions of PCs that belong to novice computer users that are loaded with crapware that are proof that your view needs some adjustment.

One of my grandparents usually just clicks "ok / next" "until the thing works". They don't understand any of the things you claim they do. And despite my best efforts to dissuade them from doing that sort of thing, they still do :-(

That's just not true. On Windows you only need to know how to click next and then look for the icon of the installed programme on your desktop.

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