Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 18:15 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Well, yes. Only a handful applications target Fedora, Ubuntu or whatever. Most just don't bother and only provide source (while MacOS and Windows users can easily try them).

Then overworked and increasingly grumpy packagers try to port all these thousand applications - but the result is increasingly disappointing. Can I try VLC? Sure! Wow. Cool. I'm using Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS (because, you know, I need to do some work, too, not just play endlessly with experimental distributions). What are may choices? Well: we recommend you install VLC 1.1.x manually.

Situation when you have one package for Ubuntu 10.04 only and another for Ubuntu 11.10 only is not uncommon.

If that was sarcasm then sorry, it does not work: sure, some packages are still provided for a few major distributions, but increasingly people just stop doing this. And even when this happens Linux versions are often behind WRT features and bugs which are fixed in MacOS/Windows versions in hurry linger for years in Linux version. Chrome/Mozilla are prime examples: Linux users often complain about that, but frankly, do they deserve anything else?