Thoughts and Questions On Yum, Up2Date. Etc.

[billg]

> In all the years that I have been using Microsoft, they have never
> provided me with a pre-installed tool that allows me to start installing
> stuff off of the web. I

No they don't, because the tool they offer is an updating tool, not a
"find and install new software" tool.  MS doesn't offer the latter.
Fedora does, and does not, in my opinion, successfully distinguish the
two tools.

My point is that  mainstream customers of any potential retail Linux
product -- people who can be expected to care no more about how Linux
works than they currently do about Windows --- will want to see updates
come only from the company that sold them their OS.  (They won't have a
clue about GPG's, so they'll ask "Just because the guy who wrote this
code has one of these GPG things, wy should I trust him? ") They won't be
trolling the web looking for new software nearly as much as current Linux
users  do, but a smart company would dramatically reduce their customer
support woes caused by installation of "alien" code if they also offered
a collection of "approved" and "official" programs for download.

These Linux users will not read man pages, will not subscribe to mailing
lists, probably won't look at the help files, etc. They'll expect all
capabilities of a tool to be apparent from its display. If, for example,
up2date has all kinds of wonderful capabilities accessible only via 
command line options, they will never know that. They just consider the
software lacking.

Hardly any of this applies to the current Linux/Fedora community, whose
members use and understand Linux. But their habits and preferences are
the wrong base on which to build a product for mainstream retail
acceptance.