Ubuntu linux vs Windows - Harder to install software? No.

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http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntucat/sof ... difficult/

Of particular interest is the comments that follow the article. They mention some of the adverse effects.

Speaking as someone who has attempted a true "moron" style installation of linux, I'd have to disagree.

Most of the time it's as easy as that - easier than Windows because in Ubunut, most of the apps are already installed.

There were still quite a few occasions where I had to go to a command prompt and type sido shite.

I didn't know what I was doing - still have never ever read anything on linux and somehow I got most of the commands right - well, the software installed anyway.

Wanna install a video player that plays just about every kind of video format known to man?

On Windows you go to videolan.org, find the right version for your computer, download it, decompress the file, and run the installer program.

To do the same thing on Ubuntu, type "apt-get install vlc" into the terminal and it's done.

Which seems easier, typing 3 words, or going through the whole download and install process manually?

In Ubuntu, if you open the Synaptic Package Manager, you're presented with a huge searchable list of free software that you can install simply by clicking on it.

Personally, I'd avoid Ubuntu and go for Linux Mint, it's essentially the same thing but far better configured, everything works perfectly out of the box with hardly any configuration.

Meh, mostly just looks like a customized version of GNOME and preinstalled media codecs. Nothing that can't be done easily enough to vanilla Ubuntu. Besides that, it lags behind Ubuntu, being a derivative. I don't like being out of date, and I don't like waiting for new toys.

I've spent the last few weeks trying to restore an up to date Vista onto a 2007 laptop, from its recovery disk. Weeks... Undiagnosable failures. Day after day of fresh updates.

Today I gave up and went back to Ubuntu. After an hour I was flying.

Installation was a snap, from Wubi. Still having some teething pains, but I'll address that in a separate thread.

Aside from having to SUDO when installing, I don't understand the problem this person has with Ubuntu. how is either using the graphical software installer, or using apt-get install be hard? IDOT!! !! !

Fogman, if you mean the article, it is written tongue-in-cheek. The author shows that a linux(and ubuntu in particular) install involves far fewer steps than the same install in windows.

I had to install Cygwin (to have joe, the best text editor out there <3) on a WinXP machine. Oh Torvalds! It sucks not to have a dependency system. It sucks not to be able to centrally update my system.

IMHO Linux is lightyears ahead of anything from Redmond or Cupertino in this respect.

Lies. Vim is the best editor.

Vim is the best editor, there are no American tanks in Baghdad and Leverkusen will win the Bundesliga

Encouraged by your discussion on text editors, I thought I'd have a look at both ... I've been using the PFE Editor for years as a poor substitute for my old DOS qedit. In any case, neither of the editors you mentioned did the extended things I wanted but in my search, I found another editor that did... http://www.contexteditor.org/

It seems to be Windows only, so it's obviously not for everyone but I'm happy with it. At long last, I'm back to being able to;

- Sort text in the editor (PFE does that)
- Rectangular Block Select (missing since QEdit)
- Macros (PFE did it)
- Multiple Files (PFE did it)

So anyway... I was wondering .... if Joe and Vim are your best editors ... why? You must be looking for quite a different feature set than me? What sets your editors apart?

I gather that you are running Windows... Vim is primarily a UNIX text editor, so probably would not be a good choice to use on Windows. Vim is an extremely powerful editor, though it has a steep learning curve. I can barely even claim to be a Vim n00b, and I still edit text considerably faster using Vim than I do with "normal" editors like Nano or Gedit. Almost any action you want to do is only a keystroke or two away, without having to constantly hold down modifier keys (escape-meta-alt-control-shift ) and you never have to touch the mouse.

Also, Vim is pretty much everywhere- standards organizations have decreed that some incarnation of Vi should be on every Posix system, so OSX and most Linux distros include vim by default.

I'm actually completely ignorant of Joe, my comment was just a tongue-in-cheek invocation of the Editor Wars. I have no idea if Joe is good, bad, or ugly.

Thanks Orwell, I'm still mostly on Windows (we use it at work and I still play some games at home). I do have my laptop loaded with ubuntu.

I guess I was trying to find out what you found attractive in an editor. It seems that it's speed. I hardly ever use the mouse anyway and I'm used to all the keyboard modifiers even though I tend to use the Ctrl+Ins / Shift+Ins / Shift+Del keys of Windows /286 instead of those newfangled Ctrl+C Ctrl+X etc keys.... sometimes you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

For me, it's features, which probably suggests that I wouldn't personally be happy with VIM.

I still have horrible memories of using VI at university. In those days, it was slightly above edlin in terms of usability. I used to take my files home and qedit them on DOS then FTP them back.