So as people have been noticing Linux, and more specifically the apps that run on it, are often extremely frustrating, either because of obtuse interfaces, lack of functionality, or both. I can't even share the author's pain in that article, because I dare to have a linux system that's not less than 60 days old. So trying to even install version 2 of the gimp (graphics editor, similar to photoshop, that I wanted to use to edit a photograph this weekend) would no doubt involve 2-3 hours of digging and installing dependencies.
With a Linux system, there's this constant vicious cycle. Upgrading everything trouble-free is near impossible because of the dependency chains, but you need the latest and greatest version of the application to get functionality even close to what the commercial (probably Windows or maybe Mac) offerings provide. I love the idea of open source software, but it's not easy to be all open source, and I don't see it getting better any time soon.
At the same time, Windows is much faster, has much better applications and mostly works as advertised without hours of tweaking, but the interface is just not for me without adding cygwin, which always feels like a band-aid to me. I'm simply not as productive, and affording licenses for everything is tough.
What I really want is a commercially supported, easy to update unix that runs on Intel hardware, and has tons of awesome applications and developer support for it. Mac almost wins, it's just so expensive. I'd have to buy a slew of apps, plus a computer that's tons for expensive, and I'm not made of money.
Like I said...frustrating.
You're obviously not using Debian. apt-get manages all the dependencies for you, even downloading them from a central repository. I've become a convert after managing Solaris boxen for years; the time savings and convenience is unbeatable, even Windows isn't as good since you have to chase the downloads, and visit vendor sites to see what's been updated, etc.
I'm not, but I've used Gentoo which is similar with it's emerge capability. Eventually after about 30 days on a distro, some new app has a dependency on really core peices; either gnome/kde itself, and more likely a slight rev of the C library. Upgrading those peices is almost never trouble-free on anyone's package-manager. Even if it works, it tends to require upgrading just about every package on the system.
More importantly, this isn't because I'm looking for OS or system patches; I just want to load a new app. Because Microsoft has most of the necessary desktop infrastructure (API-wise) in place and stable, you can upgrade and load new apps all day long, even to systems that are years old, without any hassle.
For example, grab a copy of Photoshop CS and I bet it installs trouble free on a Windows 2000 box (and maybe NT with downloading a service pack). Take Gimp 2.0 and try to install it on a 4 year old Linux distro. It's just going to go without tons of shoehorning.
That's all I'm saying; I like *nix, and would much rather use it, but I'd also rather not spend hours to install a simple application or constantly perform major system upgrades. From a sysadmin's point of view, *nix (all variants) is to me at least a lot easier to keep servers up to date or push minor security updates/patches to workstations. But I'm talking about installing the latest/greatest Open source desktop apps, because those are what's required to even come close to the functionality of payware versions.
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