An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

Posted Jan 27, 2005 22:04 UTC (Thu) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872)
In reply to: An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary by ekj
Parent article: An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

You don't think the "unofficial" label might scare people off from installing perfectly functional software? I can buy "after-market" fog lights for my car, which of course wouldn't be covered by my car manufacturer's warranty or replaced by the dealer if they break, but how many people would buy "unofficial, non-warranty" fog lights?

Terminology has meanings that are much deeper than we intend and are always somewhat different to different people. Folks coming from Windows often think of "installing" to mean "running an opaque executable from a vendor that may overwrite system settings, remove files that other applications depend on, store new files in hidden locations, and possibly covertly install spyware or even viruses, but hopefully at the end the desired application will function (after the requisite reboot)." Whereas installing a new package in most Linux distributions is much more mundane, and merely overlays a set of new files in a safe manner onto an existing system. The process is even quite easily reversible, unlike most software installations on Windows.

I agree that "Array-3" is probably unnecessary, but using new terms when the terms from similar fields don't fit quite right is a common and accepted practice.

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