So I had this discussion this afternoon with some of my friends, mostly Windows users, whether the Windows approach of installing applications is better or the Ubuntu Linux approach. Usually the Windows fan boys are convinced that the Linux approach is way too confusing, while the Linux fan boys cannot understand how the “Synaptic-Select-Apply”-approach could ever be confusing.
Well, I am a Linux fan boy, to be precise Ubuntu Linux, but I must admit that not everything is perfect with the current Ubuntu package management system (actually Debian’s), although it is very powerful!
Synaptic is perfect if you already know what you want to install. There is no way to beat it! But what if you don’t exactly know what you want? Let’s say you are looking for an email client and you’d like to see what alternatives there are besides Evolution and Thunderbird, which you already know. What is the natural step?
Right, you start googling for email clients on the internet. Maybe you get a Wikipedia page with an overview and links to their homepages. You see the features and some screenshots, and you decide that some of them look nice. But now instead of just downloading the package you have to do an unnatural step:
You have to go back to Synaptic to see if the applications you found on the internet are actually in the repositories. This is a step that is not only unnatural for beginners, but also for me, even though I’m very familiar with it. On this point most beginners look on the download page for some download. Usually they get a source tarball which they don’t know what to do with.
So to summarize the conflict: Synaptic is a perfect tool to install software, but it’s definitely bad in finding software. Internet browsing is perfect to find software, but downloading it in the browser and installing it is bad for a clean installation, because it’s not neatly integrated into the system.
My suggestion: There should be a tighter connection between the web presence of a special software package and the Debian package management system. Instead of downloading packages in the browser (be it an exe-file, a deb-file or a tarball), better provide some kind of link that is processed in that way, that it opens Synaptic with exactly that package preselected. The approach would be similar to the one used when you install the Flash-plugin in Firefox in Ubuntu 7.10: it’s triggered by Firefox, but then uses the package management system to install it.
Vice versa besides the description of a particular software Synaptic should always provide a link to the web precence of the software!
I’d be happy to get some comments on that.
