I have this mate, a windows user, who told me he heard of linux and "its dependency hell".

To be honest, I was a bit stuck answering him, 'cos I have been through it, and I didn't want to mislead him (after all, it'll me he comes to when he finally gets around to trying linux).

What's the way to counter this specific allegation about Linux?

Depends on which distro you have, but the way around it is to use: apt-get, apt4rpm, urpmi, yum, slapt-get, emerge or swaret.

Yeah......

1) use a program that solves dependency's for you... for example 'yum' which detects dependency's and downloads them and installs them for you....
for example, connect to the internet, type "yum install mplayer" and boom..... done.

2) even a trained monkey can read a failed dependency report, wonder off to rpmfind.net or their install cd's and install the reported dependency.

3) modular structures rock.... Firefox internet browser has far more features than IE, and is half the size.... infact i installed firefox on my windows machine because firefox is smaller than the path that fixes IE's security holes.

4)windows is virus / popup / spyware / defragment / service pack 112 / re-iinstall H3ll

Your Answer: "Yeah, maybe so, but I'm smart enough to use google, freshmeat.net and sourceforge.net to find the stuff I need and it isn't that big a deal now I know what I'm doing"