I've been using Linux in many forms now for about 6 months. I really love it. I've tried as many distros as I could possibly have time to do and some have better features than others. I constantly hear the question of is linux ready for the desktop. I'm wondering if it is. I try to persuade people into changing mainly b/c of security issues but honestly I cannot in good consience talk anyone into switching to an OS where software is so incredibly hard to install if you are not REALLY familiar with the diffrents ways of installing, using CHMOD, make install things like that. My question is this, is there any easier way? Yes, I know that most distros come with the software installed or on package managers that your typical person would want but there are some things that just isn't that there you may want and coming from a windows world, this is disappointing. I know that this is partially the reason that windows is rampid with viruses but there has to be some way to do this. This may sound really dumb but is there a simple script that will compile and install all types of software from source? Please help me. I want to promote linux b/c I love it but its hard to try and convince people to switch to something that your average user can't add software to!

One example of something that most people will have trouble with(something I am having trouble with) is just getting codecs for movies to work with mplayer/totem. I can't get these to play most .wmv files. Can anyone help me here also?

Hello,

Well I don't know if you've already tested Debian... that's according to me the distro which provide the easiest way to install software with its dependencies.
But I think that's a good thing that soft install is not too simple... at least it shows that you need to know what you do to install things and not anyone can install what he wants, it's up to a real admin to do that

Oliv'

I think package management can be a big problem. When I first started using Linux (Redhat 5.x) things like yum and apt were non existant so you had to hunt down for packages all over the web. These days if you use distro like Mandrake, Debian and Fedora installing packages shouldn't be very difficult if you use their built in package managers. For me Mandrake seems to be the best for people who don't know much about Linux, because the number of packages in their contrib section makes it almost unnecessary to compile packages from source or hunt them down on the net. Debian and it's derivatives follow closely. Unfortunately most newbies face package management problems because they don't know that tools like urpmi and apt exist and if they familiarise themselves with these tools, administration of software on their systems would be quite easy.