radish;284685 Wrote: > The fact that you have to provide a wikipedia link is very telling. This > hasn't been a problem for years, I can say a lot of bad things about > Windows but ease of installation is not one of them - even the article > you link to points out that most of the problems discussed were fixed > in w2k (that's 8 years ago). I personally can't think of a problematic > installation of any software in the last 5 years.
Well I am a computer science professor, and I can tell you that our sysadmins spend a significant fraction of their time dealing with software problems on the WindowsXP machines. Personally, as an only occasional Windows user I can tell you that Adobe Photoshop Elements broke other softrware on my home XP machine last year (of course what got broken under XP is known to not run at all under Vista, so this has become irrelevant). Frankly, as a desktop Linux user, installing distro-supplied software (from like 4 dvds worth online) and a few other things like Firefox and Adobe Flash, I haven't had any software issues in years (until SqueezeCenter). So individual data points are really fairly meaningless. Windows has certainly improved a great deal since 95 days, but Linux software isn't the horrible mess that many Windows users seem to think it is. Look, dependency problem are always going to be with us--if we are going to use shared libraries. Saying that MS "fixed" this 8 years ago is simply not true (just as 30 year old UNIX hasn't "fixed" the problem). They just quit letting any application change system DLLs, and provided approaches that *can* be used by developers to avoid issues (isolated applications and side-by-side assemblies--i.e., potentially having each application provide its own version of library components). It used to be fairly common practice for companies to have statically-linked versions of their Linux/UNIX software in order to completely avoid dependency issues. This is the only real way to fix the dependency issue--eliminate it! Frankly, as machines come to have larger disks and more ram, the need to use dynamically loaded and/or shared libraries becomes less and less critical. -- ncarver ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=45372 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
