I do a certain amount of editing on sound files, mainly *.wav files. I hadn't done much lately, certainly not since migrating to Mint 17.3, I thought I should get a good editor and Audacity seemed the best candidate. Accordingly, I went to the Audacity web site and found that there was not a binary for Linux though there were binaries for Windows and Mac. For Linux you had to download a bunch of files and run ./configure then make etc. I found on reading the Release Notes that I also had to download wxWidgets because Audacity uses the package but it comes separately.
Guess what? Yes, wxWidgets also had to be compiled and it required GTK+, cairo and another couple of packages whose names escape me now. More faffing about. And what other dependences would I find?
I had a look in Synaptic Package Manager for these packages without any success and on the off chance tried Software Manager: previous attempts to use facility had been futile and I had given up on it. I should also mention that I have glossed over some diversions that had cost time; so far I had spent, in vain, several hours spread over a number of days with nothing to show for my efforts and I was getting quite depressed by the whole business.
Imagine my surprise when I fired up Software Manager, clicked the "All Packages" icon and almost immediately spotted an entry for Audacity! True it is not the latest but it installed and worked straight out of the box, or should I say the Ubuntu distro. I had another hiatus when I first tried it and it wouldn't play one of my files although it would read it. I was vastly relieved when it did play some other sound files. Something wrong with the first file obviously.
Flushed with success, I had a look for gufw, the GUI front end for the Uncomplicated Fire Wall. I had previously tried to download this from both the Mint Forum and the gufw web site: neither would work. Now gufw has been installed on the machine and works OK.
I do have some grouses about Linux and Mint. Documentation is generally dismal, sketchy, skimpy and usually inadequate or simply non-existent. Too much is left for the user to work out for himself. Mint has a "getting started" manual that hasn't changed since Mint 14 which is where I first encountered it. That is not good enough.
One last thing. When I used Mint 16, I came across okular and adopted it as my go-to application for reading PDF documents. On migrating to Mint 17.3 I downloaded it from Synaptic Package Manager and found that not only would it not work, it didn't even ask me for the file to read! A quick check on the Mint Forums showed an entry suggesting an apt-get install with three packages named. I tried this and okular now worked! Investigating further I found that all three were available from SPM. Now, what I want to know is why all three weren't included with the first download of okular?