Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 18:28:23 -0500 From: Jeff Vian <jvian10@xxxxxxxxxxx>But I don't want to *have* to tweak things before I can start using them (and finding out what tweaks suit me); and I don't want to get blindsided by security holes. Yum and cron are a great help, bless them!
That goes without saying, and is part of the usability criteria.
It actually merits saying. So many answers on this list are of the
"Easy! Just download the foobar.complex-build.tgz and rebuild from source, after you custom-compile the kernel!"
variety. Sometimes you have to remind people that usability is an "out-of-the-box" assessment, yes, even for Linux.
Particularly egregious, though relatively uncommon in Linux, are packages with a third-party dependency that must be downloaded from an entirely separate, sometimes inaccessible source.
"Oh, yeah. You need the Framistator from joe-blow.com to link in with this!"
In fact, I don't think it can be stated enough in the Linux community - things should work without tweaks, recompiles, source builds and the like, for almost all cases. You shouldn't have to be a RHCE just to use the product.
