Have been playing with few Linux distros I have figured out what stop people (and maybe me as well) from migrating to Linux.

• Hardware installation. I just posted a question in the hardware section of this forum asking how can I install my Minitar wireless network card (sorry I can't give the link to my post as I am not allowed yet to have URL in my post). It is so hard to install a hardware on Linux when the hardware is not installed out of box (included in the distro installation package). Wondering when we can have true plug and play with Linux as we are now enjoying with Windows. Plug the hardware, get the notification that a new hardware has been installed, select the driver, and GO... You get your hardware installed and working.
• Software installation. Some softwares installation will require us to compile it first before we can use it... all those steps are too complex for end user. Why can't we have an executable file (.exe in Windows) and double click it, select the folder where we want to install the software and the rest will be taken care of by Linux.

Given all those credits to Linux and critics to Windows I can't understand why Linux developers don't focus on those two things first. We have so many distros yet none of them implement a user-friendly hardware and software installation as what Windows implemented.

I am not either in favour of Linux or Windows. I really want to use Linux but it is just too hard. GUI-wise, I like Linux as few distros (like SUSE) has come up with a very nice GUI... but when it comes to install something...

Ehm... that's just my thought.

You've posted the other question less then one hour ago and has not more then 5 views so far. You've to be patient. Remember, this is an Internation forum, meaning that half of the planet is either working or sleeping now, depending where you are. You can bump your thread if you don't get any replies after 24 hours. If that's not good enough for you, you can try IRC or pay for support.

Oh, and I disagree with everything you just said about Software. I can open a command line and type "apt-get install gimp", or "emerge gaim" or "urpmi gftp" and I get everything downloaded, installed and properly configured to me without even opening a web-browser, going to the vendors site, download the .exe and click on it, then click on > next > next and reboot the system.

Again, I don't agree with you on the Software part. It may sound difficult for you because you still don't know how to configure your distro to install things the easy way. If it's SuSE, check this thread I wrote out:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...postid=1087289

About hardware... sorry, but I also disagree. Linux is today more plug and play then Windows is. I had to actually install drivers for my sATA, Sound Blaster and scanner (as example) in Windows, whereas in Linux, all works out of the box. The difference is that hardware vendors usually provide drivers for their hardware, Windows-only. All you've to do is to open a browser, go the the vendors web-site, download the driver, double-click, then "next >> next >> next >> agree with license", reboot. For my scanner, I do "modprobe scanner", done.

With Linux, most of the times you have to wait till the community can get a piece of hardware to work, which is no easy task either, since most vendors don't give any hardware specifications of their product...

If you still don't link Linux.. well, ask for the money you've paid for it back

Regards!

P.S: if this is another of those Linux Vs Windows, please, collaborate with existent threads. If it's not, give more details of your problems, distributions and how you are trying to install software so peoples can help you. I've no idea about your network issues since I don't have such a device.

sounds like a troll thread, but in case you're not trolling, which distros have you tried? in my experience, software is much easier to install in linux than in windows. in linux, you can use package managers like apt-get, portage, yum, etc. which do everything for you, including download the software.

in windows, you have to find it and download it yourself (or load the CDRom and wait for it to start) then you have to tell it where to install, make directories, unzip packages, etc. and sometimes you have to select all sorts of options that waste your time and go through registration screens, not to mention having to reboot one or more times, or worse, having the computer just reboot automatically without even any warning after you press "finished." it sucks and it's a major pain in the butt.

on distros like slack where you sometimes have to compile your own stuff you might have to download and untar some files, but it's really no harder than in windows once you know how to do it. and if you get .tgzs, you just have to install them. no doubt about it, linux wins hands down over windows for ease of use in installing software. if it doesn't, you're just using the wrong distro.

i could also give you tons of windows software/hardware horror stories, like doing a complete fresh windows install for someone, going through an hour or more of installing software, and then suddenly on one of the many reboots, the CDROM drive just disappears, with the littel yellow circle and exclamation mark (!) over it in the hardware manager. removing it multiple times and doing "hardware wizard" or whatever didn't work at all (said it was installed and rebooted, only to have it non-functional on reboot). the only remedy was starting completely over from scratch. turns out some media software was screwing something up, and it didn't even work after removing the software. only thing to do was reinstall. no doubt about it, windows sucks. i'm glad i don't use that POS software, but it causes enough headaches when friends have problems and they all come running to you to fix it.

Linux is a community dependent project. All you need to do is simply jump in an help the project by working to get the features you want implemented. Linux is what we make it.

Now as far as your complaints.

1. Many things are plug and play, and the list is growing everyday.

2. Why compile versus an EXE-like file? Because we want to be able to compile the program for our specific system. It generates a more effcient program and a smaller install. Some distros use what is an exe-like file. RPM for one. In Red Hat systems you can simply double click the file and the installation starts, or so you hope. The disadvantages are numerous, but the main one is simply, the code is most likely not optimized for your system.

And finally you might want to read...

Linux is not Windows

Don't forget that you can help the community effort :-) by offering your services.

I like compiling software from source. I can see what's in it, learn how to do new things in my own programming and change games so I start on a higher level

Oopss. I didn't expect that my post would invite such replies.
And I did not start this thread as a complain on why there is no response yet to my other post. Don't get me wrong... I pointed out that I did another post just to indicate that I have problem with installing my hardware.

No, it is not. I believe such comparison will be endless and I know that there are enough articles about this. By posting this thread I just hope that I can have Linux that is as easy as Windows when it comes to installing software and hardware. I have read all your replies and all of you said that installing software and hardware in Linux are easier than in Windows. I think this will be very dependent on the technical skills of each people. My point of view is from someone who is more comfortable with "click-and-drag" rather than unix-like command line.

I didn't say that Windows is perfect... it might have a lot of problems... but what I want to highlight is the user-friendliness it is promoting. I am sure that Linux Developers will be able to invent something much more stable and trouble free yet as easy as.

It is true. The article gave me another sight to view Linux. Why I want to try and may finally migrate to Linux? Because the user interface of some Linux distros are already as nice as or even nicer than Windows. Like I said I really like SUSE GUI. Second, because it is free. Well I may don't have enough reason to migrate to Linux... (and I don't really have problem with Windows as well...)... but I still want to give it a shot... especially if I can have all my hardware runs.

Thanks for your replies... and I hope this encourages some Linux Developers to make Linux even more friendly. I am sure that what has been done with LinSpire can be pushed further.

the hardware support is not the blame on the linux devs but on the hardware manufactures. this is why Nvidia is much more supported by the *nix community vs ATI due to the fact that nvidia provides drivers that WORK in linux and spend a lot of time developing working strong drivers for linux. ATI on the other hand only uses 4% of the company resources on developing linux drivers for their cards. that has nothing to do with linux and everything to do with the hardware makers. this is exactly why i refuse to buy or sell anything from Linksys until they start supporting linux for their wifi cards.

as for software installs, if you are running a source based distro like slax or slackware or gentoo you will already know enough about linux that installing a file from source is not hard for you. if that is more then you want to deal with, then try out a debian based or rpm based distro:

Ubunto, Kubunto, Knoppix, Debian, Fedora Core, SuSe Pro, etc... all provide a very powerful tool (yum or apt-get) for installing software they also have rpm -ivh or dpkg -i for installing something that is not in a respository or that does not need a respository.

those are as easy as:

yum install kde

or

apt-get install kde

and after X amount of time depending on your internet connection and a few other varables you now have a full GUI installed on your system. try that with windows some time... good luck, will not work like that. FYI last i checked KDE was in excess of 390 individual packages and files that need to be downloaded, configured, and installed. so in the windows world that would be roughly 390 double clicks to do the exact same thing that yum install or apt-get install accomplished.

there are also self installers like the nvidia drivers that just require a sh /path/to/file/name/file.sh and away it runs. that is just as easy as going into the CMD prompt in win2k/XP and typing notepad.exe after navigating to the correct path to run that executable and faster if you know exactly were the file is stored.

rpm will go one step further and alow you to install a package from the internet:

rpm -ivh http://URL.com/filename.rpm

rpm will first download the file, then due to the v argument it will verify that it is correct and has the correct MDK5sum, then it will display a set of #### with a % due to the h arguement as it installs the package you just told your system to install. windows has nothing even remotely close to that kind of power or versatility in installing ANYTHING.

windows does a few things better then linux, but that is not due to anything other then the mafia like strong arm tactics the MS has employed over the past few decades that have gotten it in trouble with both the US gov. and the EU.

if you do a little research before you buy hardware for a system and see if it will work in linux then you will have nothing to worry about. heck you even really should do this in windows as i have lost count how many video or sound cards have conflicts with specific motherboards in windows over the years.

is linux perfect, nope, but then again neither is windows.

All of the software installation programs that people mentioned in their replies have GUI frontends that require the user just to type the name of the package they want to install and click 'Install'. That's why its easier to install software than in Windows where the user has to google for the program, download it, double-click it, agree to licence, choose install options, choose install location and so on. There's a lot more steps involved there and its a lot more confusing and time consuming for the user.

As for the hardware if your hardware is detected automatically by your distro installation is easier than in Windows - you usually don't have to do anything. If not then it can become quite problematic. But the real problem isn't really ease of installation (drivers can be packaged in RPM packages for one-click installs like mentioned above) but lack of drivers and hardware support.

If you weren't using a distro that has a GUI package management program, so you don't have to compile from source, or automatic hardware detection (and modern kernels and modules so more hardware is supported) then you've used the wrong distro for what you want and you should look at distros like Mandriva, Suse, Ubuntu etc.

Can you believe I already responded to you months before you typed your post?

http://www.psychocats.net/essays/linuxdesktop.php
http://www.psychocats.net/essays/winuxinstall.php

I gotta say Gentoo's emerge makes it far easier to update and install things then anything in windows. You also get the advantage of having custom compiled code for your machine which results in faster software.