KDE makes their stuff available for OS X. One day I tried Amarok, partly because a Linuxing friend used it and recommended it, mainly because the Mike Oldfield song of the same name is my favorite song of all time. It installed a bunch of crap on my computer, added a folder directly to my root user, took a minute to launch, displayed a huge logo while it was launching, presented me with the ugliest interface I've ever faced on this operating system, took hours to find my music, then crashed when I tried to play a song.
Apple is of the opinion that its programs have to be unique and special. After my experience with KDE-on-Mac, I'm going to agree and say that if Linux things ran instantly on the Mac, the quality of experience for anybody who made an effort to run them would drop sharply.
I'm fine with the App system on the Mac. It's ultrasimple. Package management is a teeny bit simpler, but it's not enough for me to bother over.
I'm fine with the App system on the Mac. It's ultrasimple. Package management is a teeny bit simpler, but it's not enough for me to bother over.
I'm not sure it's actually simpler; as a software author, my experience has been:
If I want to release something for the Mac, I post a dmg containing a dragable application; and even the most non-technical user can download and install it immediately. Sparkle provides automatic updates via my website; users gets the latest versions whenever they want them, I don't have to do anything complicated.
If I want to release something for the UNIXes, I provide a set of autoconf scripts and a make-based build system (or one of the recent alternatives, or a Python egg, or a Ruby gem), hope that the package management systems pick it up during their next release cycle, wind up in an argument with Debian over OpenSSL+GPL licensing compatibility, and see my software get shipped with half the featured turned off and a ridiculous number of local hacks applied, including all-too-regularly replacement of a working library dependency with something that doesn't work (but Debian likes it more).
The average end-user doesn't see my updates for months or years, the software is missing features and locally modified, and I have to wonder: Why couldn't I just give them something that they could drag to their applications folder?
You could always provide your own package repository and/or build your own packages. It's not terribly difficult, and certainly isn't any more difficult that maintaining your own auto-update mechanism anyways. And if you have your own package repo, users will get updates from your repository whenever they update their system...
You still have the problem of having your package's dependencies be broken/mutilated/ancient -- the only solid way to get around it is to statically link with your own unfucked builds, but that isn't always possible.
Apple is of the opinion that its programs have to be unique and special. After my experience with KDE-on-Mac, I'm going to agree and say that if Linux things ran instantly on the Mac, the quality of experience for anybody who made an effort to run them would drop sharply.
I'm fine with the App system on the Mac. It's ultrasimple. Package management is a teeny bit simpler, but it's not enough for me to bother over.