In Windows it was so easy. I would download the installer, click it, it would install, and poof... a cute little icon would appear on my desktop. Why can't Linux try to make installing just as easy? Why do I have to bother with command lines, manuals, code, making my own icons, and searching for stuff?

You don't. Feel free to return to using Windows.

I can't. I'm tired of being hacked and getting viruses. LOL.

Would it really hurt the Linux community though if they would just make installing programs easier?

Installing is already easy using tools such as urpmi, apt, yum etc (and compiling from source if you desire). Linux is not windows, so to use it effectively, you will have to get used to the command line unless you use distros like Xandros, Lycoris and Lindows.

In Debian, you have a graphical package manager (front end for Debian) called "synaptic".

Debian has a huge amount of packages in their repositories (over 15000 packages) and to install any program, all you need to do is double click on the package name and you're done. It's super easy to install programs with synaptic.

Debian's apt system also auto-handles dependencies both while installing and uninstalling so you have no problems.

Try Debian with "testing" as the repositories. You'll like the package management system in Debian so much that you'll hardly go back to Windows.

when i was using mandrake i was installing software via mandrake control center. there was nothing tough with it...

indeed with linux you don´t have to surf around web to find installer. no need to download mozilla from mozilla site unless you want to. just click mozilla in synaptic and you are set. it is far more easy than with windows.

Or there's Gentoo. Last thing I installed was Doom3 - it was very complicated:

emerge doom3

doom3

and the game started.

If you don't like your distro's package manager, get a different one! That's the great thing about Linux: It has lots of choices

With many distros, simply double-clicking on an rpm package icon in the filebrowser will allow you to install, provided you don't have dependencies not met.

My thoughts exactly. To me, the most important part of each distribution is its package management system. Thats why I use Gentoo and Arch(which is not to say that other distro's package management systems are not worthy).

I'm surprised at the almost hostile responce this post has received. I'm sure this is a matter of great frustration to all newbie Linux users, including me. You could be more supportive towards our difficulties. We're still learning.

And yes, Linux is not Windows. And I'm grateful about that. And yes, it is easy to install software if it has come with the distro. Like with Mandrake I have plenty of software to choose from to install and it's a lot easier than ever in Windows.

The problem comes when you can't find the rpm packages nor does it come with the distro. You have to compile from source. Now, I've noticed that even mentioning such a possibility has made potential Linux-users to turn away from choosing it.

Yes, there is nothing complicated about
./configure
make
make install

But the fact is that I have managed to compile from source like that only once. And that was with libdvdcss, so thank goodness for that. But every single time other than that I've ended up with a pretty complicated error message that I can't make heads or tails out of. Even if I have read books about Linux.

But I've come to accept that as a reality. With Windows, I had thousands of inconveniences. With Linux, I have this one. And possibly when I get more familiar with the system, I learn how to overcome this obstacle as well.

If you experience errors compiling from source, usually there is an error message that indicates what went wrong. If you don't understand the message, then post the errors on a forum like this one and others will help you out. You will find that once you have compiled a few packages and done some troubleshooting, you will have very few problems dealing with the error messages you meet when compiling from source.

I have to say, I've been hugely underwhelmed by RPMs as a package system. All I ever seem to hear about them is the problems people have with them. And my own experiences with them were abysmal.

Try a non-RPM distro. There are some wonderful ones out there!

henrikanttonen

It can be a little abstract at first and they have come a Looooong way from what it used to be but the more times you do it the easier it is. When I first started out in Linux I tried for about 3 days to install a package called ecasound on my red hat 7.2 distro and I finally gave up! If you start in with problems on dependancies it can be a real bear. But for the most part now yum or apt are amazing at installing and removing and updating packages. Apt-get install go have coffee come back and play.

You know you just answered your own question here...

If installing programs was as easy under Linux as it is under Windoze, then you'd have add-ware and viruses galore...

There are graphical installation routines, RPM managers, APT-GET front ends, and Loki installers...

But the permission system isn't going away. If it does, there goes your security.