Curious about certain kinds of installations 4009

Madhusudan Singh

Ease of use?

While pretty well any application can be compiled to run under any distro, the point of a package manager is to make life easier. Not all applications are available under all distro package managers. Life's too short to buttemble an application and its dependencies and kick them into shape by hand when they can be installed by the package manager of a different distro.

I am currently using FC3 mostly, but I also make use of a Zip drive as an occasional removable backup medium. FC3 no longer supports the drive, so I fire up Debian when I need it. On the other hand, FC3 has a very smooth VPN-Remote desktop client which I use several times a week, which is not available under Debian without hand compilation, manual security updating etc.

I will get around to installing FC4 at some point, but as a new installation. I don't want to find that something else I use in FC3 has been dropped, and that I've already wiped FC3.

So there are hardware and software support issues. Why should I waste the customary two or three days re-learning Linux audio to persuade something to work on a particular distro, if it works out of the box on another?

Sometimes it is simple configuration rather than manually-compiled applications, in which case it's easy enough to readetc from the working distro while running the other.

Finally, a potter around the menus of a new distro may well show you useful but obscure applications you wouldn't otherwise find. Or at least I wouldn't, as I would describe myself as a computer user rather than a full-time admin.