Something going on with Fedora

> Have you tried to do the same (compile software and it's dependencies from scratch) under
Windows? Try it some time. You'll probably need to find few abandoned packages, buy some tools
- and in the end get some non-working piece of software because your system included wrong set
of headers...

They point is _I_Don't_have_to_. Not when I just want to run the software.

Every major open source project I've seen that has Windows support supplies Windows users with
executables and supplies Linux users with source tarballs, with only a few exceptions on the
Linux side.

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I think your misunderstanding me a bit:


What I want to see is a video game like Planeshift (It's a decent Linux MMORPG which follows
the ID Software approach were the engine is GPL, but the game itself is open, but non-free)
simply supply two DEB (or whatever) packages, themselves, that outline the dependencies and
versions they need.

Then the various distributions just pull down that package. If there is something wrong then
they figure it out and send a patch back to upstream.

Right now the package makers working for the various distributions are a huge bottleneck in
the distribution of new Linux software. This is because it requires such a huge manual
brute-force approach. For some software this is the only way it's going to work, but for the
vast majority.. something I expect like 80% don't need that level of dedication from the
distributions. 

Even if they supply it in deb-src format, and distributions use their servers to compile it,
then it's still worlds better then what we have now.

Get it now?

Going back to video games, in Linux there is no way for the average Linux user to compile
them. The makers of them are forced to use all those nasty scripts and install dialogs to
package them for Linux users. That's they only way they can get it to work.

And like you said they are full of nastiness like having to use scripts with ld_library_path
and statically compiled binaries and weirdness. These make the games much larger then they
need to be and make it impossible for Linux users to use anything but the very latest games on
the very latest distribution releases.

And beta testing? _FORGET_IT_. It's impossible. Even for the latest and greatest from Debian
Unstable I need to do things like setup a chroot environment because trying to install the
software I need will obliterate any hope of having apt-get not break my system. And with that
your looking at _days_ of effort. 

And on top of that, because the way Linux users are utterly dependent on their
distributions-supplied packages, there is no way the average Linux users will ever know about
90% of the games that are available for Linux unless they subscribe religiously to something
like happypenguin.org,

So what we have in Linux distributions is a handful of fairly decent FPS or some smaller
'gnome' or 'kde' games and older stuff that are packaged by the distribution maintainers, but
they don't have the time or desire to track down every new release of every game out there.

And that's just games. 

I could go on and on for any sort of type of software you want.

How about Host-based Intrusion detection systems? I am working on evaluating that stuff from
work and due to various thingsthat are 100% out of the control of myself, my bosses, and my
entire company, having to compile things from source is not fun. It's certainly possible, but
it adds lots of hoops. And entirely besides that I don't like to have to install a large
number of developer's tools on production machines.

How many of these are packaged by your distribution?
Samhain
OSSEC
Integrit
AIDE
Tripwire (OSS version)
Tiger

They all seem to be good, solid, and stable pieces of software. And they don't have very
complex dependencies or anything like that. Some are packaged for certain distributions, some
are packaged for others, and some are packaged for none. There is no reason why they can't
simply supply a couple binaries in their own packages so I can install them and test them out,
except that I can't. Because distributions are the gatekeepers to what is installable on my
system and they don't have the manpower to manage all of that on their own.

(OOOHHH.. that's right. I am using Linux so I don't have to care about malware or rootkits
because the packages supplied by my distribution is the perfect way to provide my system with
unbreakable security. Well that solves that problem!)

Well from a Linux desktop perspective the 2.6 kernel was a pretty big improvement.

It added much better level of interactivity, better response. (although I have to recompile my
kernel to get it since Debian ships their with preemptive-ness disabled by default).

With Udev and friends it's added significantly better hardware detection and hotplug
capabilities. Improvements in drivers helped also.. ie my system no longer crashes when I plug
in a USB hub chain with 7 different devices attached. (for most benefit of being able to
autoconfig input devices and video cards and such you have to wait for X.org to catch up)

And despite what other people may have wanted to believe, devfs sucked majorly. It may have
worked in some cases, but it failed every time I touched it. 

Remember back in the day when the first step of any Linux installation was to break out
Windows Device Manager and write down all the hardware on your system? It's been a hell of a
long time since I ever seen anybody suggest that. With 2.4 when ever I tried to install Linux
I'd have to go at the computer with a screwdriver in one hand and a cdrom in another.

 I also no longer have to drop to root to mount USB drives. I don't have to drop to root to
switch networks or join a vpn... and it doesn't involve any setuid root binaries.. dbus and
udev is a much safer, much more secure way to approach general desktop stuff. I now actually
have suspend-to-ram that actually works. Much Much better power management facilities. The
biggest differences, for desktop users, are going to be felt on mobile devices.

Of course a lot of that is the kernel + userspace stuff, but it wouldn't be possible without
many of the kernel changes.