But you have to live under the wing of your distro mantainers, instead of installing whatever you want from any third party. Isn't Linux supposed to be about freedom?
Yes, you can install software using tarballs, but it's not usable for 90% of users, and not because of the distribution model, but because of the lack of standardization in a good, easy to use application-installing API.
I get the base OS along with a very long list of apps with any distro. For example Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse etc - all will curate a lot of apps for me. If I want to go off piste I download the code and crack on. I have several compilers to choose from LLVM, gcc int al out of the box.
tarball installs is pretty much close to the state of Windows app installations. You have to find the bloody things, download them each time and hope you have found the right one and not a trojaned one. Each one needs its own update routine and will not be updated when the rest of the system is updated.
The Windows and Apple software distribution model is archaic compared to all Linux/BSD etc distros.
>tarball installs is pretty much close to the state of Windows app installations.
Except that they're hard to install for a novice user.
>You have to find the bloody things, download them each time and hope you have found the right one and not a trojaned one. Each one needs its own update routine and will not be updated when the rest of the system is updated.
None of those are problems for me, the actual problems are: installing all the dependencies and then executing the make commands. Both of those could be solved with a well designed API.
>The Windows and Apple software distribution model is archaic compared to all Linux/BSD etc distros.
The Windows and apple software distribution works for all my use cases, the Linux model doesn't (eg: if I want many versions of the same package, if I want a package that isn't included in the repos, etc).
Also, from a philosophical and aesthetical point of view, the Windows & Mac distribution model is better: you get your OS from the OS developer, and you get your specific-use applications from the developer of said application. You are not dependent on a single entity that supposedly knows what you need better than you.
> You are not dependent on a single entity that supposedly knows what you need better than you.
This right here is what Linux Desktop doesn't seem to understand. The whole culture is ingrained with the attitude that they do, in fact, know what you need better than you.
> But you have to live under the wing of your distro mantainers, instead of installing whatever you want from any third party. Isn't Linux supposed to be about freedom?
You don't. Yes, but if you don't take advantage of the freedom, that's not freedom's fault.
> Yes, you can install software using tarballs, but it's not usable for 90% of users, and not because of the distribution model, but because of the lack of standardization in a good, easy to use application-installing API.
See Flatpak. Go look at what software is available at https://flathub.org/apps , but both GNOME and KDE have application managers that can install from Flatpak repos (configured to use Flathub by default), and possibly the distro's native package manager as well (via PackageKit).
Yes, you can install software using tarballs, but it's not usable for 90% of users, and not because of the distribution model, but because of the lack of standardization in a good, easy to use application-installing API.