I spent about an hour quite frustrated with Linux Mint (trying for the first time with 14 MATE). Nothing would install from the Software Manager. It would fail without any helfpul error messages (that I could detect). Since I'm recently more familiar with Yum, it took me a while to get around to find apt-get update (which seemed to fix everything when followed by an apt-get -f install). (of course sudo is needed for both commands)

If Mint is supposed to be user friendly, what about setting up Software Manager to suggest an equivalent to apt-get update if an install fails? Or just to default to an apt-get update equivalent the first time it's run on a new installation?

Thanks

what exactly is your question?
maybe something is wrong with your computer if software mangager fails to install package on out of the box linux mint installation.

However main problem of linux mint is that it is unable to upgrade (let's say from "mint 14" to "mint 15")

You can manually upgrade that way, and there are plenty of users doing so, but because this way of upgrading has a 20% failure rate on Ubuntu it isn't supported by Linux Mint currently. That is not suitable to less technical users, or users new to Linux.

yooy,

My main point was that from my experience, Software Manager would not work when I installed it. Fresh, first time install (no Upgrade involved). What fixed it was apt-get update followed by apt-get -f install. I posted because
1) others might find it when googling around and might have to spend less time frustrated.
2) I wanted to float the idea of whether having Software Manager automatically do apt-get update on first run, because in my experience, most of the packages it was pointing to (when it was first installed) did not actually exist on the net anymore (at least not where it was looking). Maybe others would read the idea and say "Yeah, they're already working on that. Maybe in the next build." or "Great idea! I know somebody who could whip up that patch in no time!" or "That's a bad idea because..."

I found the cognitive dissonance too high when combining the "Mint is a user-friendly/beginner-friendly operating system" marketing with something as seemingly critical as "Software Manager doesn't work out of the box".

Whenever I've installed Mint (or Ubuntu for that matter) I've found that after a short while the system warns me that updates are available and after they';re installed all is well. It sounds like your network may take a little while to connect. That's supposing that the Mint developers haven't got something in the wrong order on the latest version.

Have you tried using synaptic to install packages? It generally gives you error messages when something is out of sorts and may even let you know how to resolve the issues.

In the lower right corner is the icon for the Update Manager. I believe if you click on that icon it will start the same process that is initiated with the "sudo apt-get update" followed by "sudo apt-get upgrade".

Update Manager should update the package database every time it is run (I doubt that it will directly call apt-get for that, more likely it uses libapt), otherwise it could not be aware of possible updates. Running is only needed when your dependency chain is inconsistent or the package manager was not able to configure a package, most of the time that is the case after a failed installation.

May it be possible that your network connection was unreliable at that time? If not this may indeed be a bug and if it is repeatable you should report it.