Linux Vs. FreeBSD 7122
what's wrong with compiling? i like it, it's very intoxicating i was able to grasp the concept of exporting CFLAGS && CXXFLAGS variables and running...
Simple: Being able to see the source code is only an important personal, as opposed to collective, freedom, for the small minority of people who are actually programmers. On the other hand, compiling source code is annoyingly slow and relatively difficult when it cones to things such as build environments. It's nice to know that with free software, anyone can see the source code and is free to hack it, but given that I only have minimal programming skills, it really is of no use for me personally to be able to see the source code, along with about 99% of other users. For us, binaries are just plain easier.
Elaborating on the whole binary compatibility thing, if you try to install something intended for one distro on another, different GCC versions, library versions, etc. make it virtually impossible, as I understand it. Debian vs. Fedora is actually a bad example, because they use different package managers. A better example would be Fedora vs. Suse. You usually can't install a Fedora package on Suse or vice versa. Correct me if I'm wrong on this one, but I can't imagine why else they would package things separately for each of these distros. This is an extreme pain in the you-know-what for users who don't want to compile source themselves and are using anything but the most popular, well-known distros.
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