Linux Vs. FreeBSD 7126

Near-complete binary and point-and-click installation tool compatibility between all recent versions so that if the program exists for Windows, the same binary with a point-and-click installer will install on any recent version. I know there are some instances where this is not the case, but these are the exception, not the rule. Also, the design of the OS and generally accepted means of packaging software. This method is to basically include all DLLs in every package and if necessary have multiple concurrent versions of the same DLL running simultaneously. This wastes memory and hard drive space, both of which are cheap and are getting cheaper. Therefore, it is clumsy and inefficient from a back end perspective. However, it is simple and elegant from an end-user perspective, in that almost any program can be installed with just a few clicks, as soon as it is released, regardless of what *modern* flavor of Windows you're running. Also, having to either package the same program for every distro, have centralized repositories, and-or have the user manually resolve dependencies is clumsy and inefficient too, just in different ways.

To be fair, though, Windows does have it easier in that there are only a few modern flavors of it, namely 2000, XP, and Server 2003, and maybe marginally ME and 98 (if you want to consider these modern). Linux has about a zillion modern flavors. On the other hand, though, given that upgrades are generally inexpensive or free and therefore users of Linux generally don't resist them as much as users of Windows, I'm sure in the Linux world view, a distro from 2000 or even 2003 is not considered modern and therefore generally not a high priority when it comes to making sure new software works on it, nor should it be.