> 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.
