What makes Ubuntu so popular and on the rise

[Chanchao]

On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 03:52 -0400, mutsuura at mutsuura.com wrote:

> So are you saying that 'apt' provides "pre-configured" package
> installation? By 'install by hand' you mean build from tar-ball.

No, suppose you're installing a program called XYZ. Apt then checks all
the components that need to be installed in order for XYZ to run. It
checks that everything is there, and at the right version. If it finds
that some components aren't available or aren't the required version,
then it automatically downloads those components as well.

Before this way of doing things, Linux based operating systems suffered
terribly from 'dependency-hell' where installing anything required major
work because there were always other components that weren't quite
right, or you even got conflicts, where XYZ required a particular
package in version 2 (and nothing else) and package PQR required the
same package but in a different version.  It was messy.

These days though this is all in the past, you just select the program
you want installed and apt (Synaptic) takes care of the rest.

Cheers,
Chanchao