"Download & Install" vs "Repositories & Synaptic" and the need for a new URI [Was: Re: Going forward [Re: Automatix?]]

[Florian Diesch]

Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 11:11 +0700, Chanchao wrote:
>> On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 13:04 +1200, Jason Taylor wrote:
>> 
>> > "Installing new downloaded software is one
>> > of the most common tasks performed by desktop users at home and in
>> > small offices. Until the Linux suppliers can make this task trivial,
>> > they will continue to miss out on a whole world of users beyond the
>> > command line geeks."
>> 
>> To which the totally obvious response is "Ha! We don't need any of
>> that, we have Repositories and Synaptic!" [chuckles, gloats, hi-five's all
>> around]. 
>> 
>> [Bear with me with the following, it gets interesting near the end. :)]
>> 
>> But is that a good response?  For sure, having Synaptic is great. It's
>> especially great if you know what you're looking for and if it's in the
>> repositories that you have enabled.
>> 
>> But even then, is that the way people go looking for software, browsing
>> Synaptic?  It is not. Because Synaptic is only Step Two.  The first step
>> is FINDING OUT what is the most suitable software anyway, and what it's
>> called.
>
> Try gnome-app-install. You can open it from Applications ->
> Add/Remove... It addresses steps one and two at the same time. This

What's missing is a good search function that understands more than one
single word. Peopele want to search for "audio cd burn", "mp3 gnome" or
things like that. At the time only apt-cache can do this. IMHO if
there's an easy to use, powerful search function and an easy tom find
"search for softwere" menu entry people will use it as there they get
better results as with google.


   Florian
-- 
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