On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

I just read this on ArsTechnica:

IMHO Linux needs to be able to install software by the click of an icon (after asking for the super user password ofcourse), when it can’t, normal users gets frustrated.

You can. It’s just a bit different from Windows. Ubuntu is not Windows. It doesn’t do everything the same. Basically when you move to a Linux distribution like Ubuntu–expect to do a little learning; I think it’s a bit obnoxious for any user to say, “Oh I couldn’t get it to work in five minutes, so it’s crap.”

Sorry, but we’ve all had to learn Windows at one point probably and yet some people forget what it was like when the sat a computer for the first time and tried to figure out what to do. I remember sitting at Windows 2.03/286 and being completely dumbfounded; the same with Windows 3.1 to an extent.

Basically this is the most important thing you need to get out of your head for installing software on Ubuntu:

You do not go to the website of the software you want to download to get a ‘Setup.exe’ or similar.

Instead you:

1. Click Applications
2. Choose Add/Remove…
3. Search or Browse through software library, e.g. look through games, education, office or search for something e.g. ‘AbiWord’ or ‘LyX’
4. Once you’ve found it, tick it to say you want it.
5. Repeat from step 3 for any other software you want to install at the same time.
6. Click Apply Changes.
7. Hey presto, application is downloaded and installed, and plonked in your Applications menu under the relevant category e.g.: SuperTux in Games and LyX in Office for example.

You do not need to agree to a license as you do in most cases on Windows, you don’t need to choose a location or rarely will you be asked any specific options, you tick it, and click Apply Changes and it does the rest for you.

If it’s not there, then you need to do some hunting on websites; which may lead you to a whole new territory of compiling from source and so forth.

However for most tasks, Add/Remove… will have everything you need. If a newer version isn’t there; it’s because it’s not been tested and packaged by the Ubuntu team as yet.

I might be wrong and this might be really difficult to grasp; but my view is that this method works better than Windows with setup.exe files and so forth. Even my parents grasped this easily. But then people also come to me saying, “Mac OS (X) sucks because I can’t install software.” Erm, have you tried just double clicking it or dragging the icon to your hard disk volume where you want the program, most likely /Applications?

Face it folks, if you try something other than Windows, such as Linux or Mac OS X you’re doing so because it’s not Windows, and because it’s not Windows it’ll do some things differently. I think it is so arrogant and obnoxious that some people no matter what it is lambaste something because they couldn’t be bothered to spend 5-10 minutes reading some documentation.

The same thing happens for users who switch to Vista from 2000/XP and wonder where things might have gone, get real–read the help files, read the documentation on the web, buy a book on the matter; but don’t expect to take knowledge from one vendor’s system and be able to sit down and then point the finger when you clearly have not read up on things to acquaint yourself with something.

I’m all for saying there are some thing Linux (again just using it as an umbrella term) does wrong and I’ll point them out without remorse. But seriously… Hey maybe I should buy an automatic transmission car and then complain that I wasn’t able to drive away straight away because I’ve only ever driven manual (stick) cars. Or that I can’t program Python as well as I can PHP after one month…