[Nottingham] [Talk] Thursday 19/06/2008 - What is there on Linux? What can it do?

[Michael Erskine]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 12:21 PM, Camilo Mesias <camilo at mesias.co.uk> wrote:
> With free software, no-one has to make money from selling it, and that
> means no-one has bothered to make a decent tool for getting new
> software.

What is the decent non-free tool for getting new non-free software?
Browsing off-the-shelf software in stores? C'mon!

> We're stuck with searching for package names, probably from
> the command line, and with the presumption that we know what we are
> looking for.

No, no, and... Nope!

Seriously: I generally have no idea what free software packages are
available for a particular task until I start using one or more of the
free tools at my disposal. If I didn't happen to know about the search
capabilities of the various package management front ends I'd be
likely to ask someone (in the forums or perhaps on a local LUG mailing
list :) ).

> How is a newbie supposed to find a package like 'R' from
> a description of what they want to do?

If the package description is poor, it's a bug and it needs fixing.

> And how can the differentiate
> between that and GnuPlot or GraphViz (say).

Well there's many ways to crack that nut: reputation of the package is
a good discriminator that works well for me. I like to check out the
Wikipedia page for the package or the sourceforge forums. In the end
it might come down to trying out a few similar packages to see which I
prefer.

> I think there's a lot of usability in the free software world, but the
> last 5% is the hardest.

I couldn't say that the non-free software world has conquered this last 5%!

> There's great software out there without
> adequate or consistent help. Many potential users are denied the
> opportunity.

Lack of suitable documentation is a bug - report it and it should get
fixed. If it doesn't get fixed then that project is broken! You are
then free to... no! it is your public duty to... slag it off in public
forums :).

Regards,
Michael.