Amen to that! I wish more developers understood that people don't care about freedom, they just want the stuff they buy to work without major effort. 99.9% of people don't want to setup MythTV, they want a PVR that works
Disagreed; i think all it is is that FOSS developers like making cool stuff, and for them the setup is not a chore.
In a commercial app there is a requirement to make the installation routine simple because you have to sell the app. With a Linux (and sometimes just generally with FOSS) that drive isn't necessarily there.
It's a general FOSS problem; programs tend to lack that last little bit of polish that would "sell" them - but that is a ball ache to add in.
I fail to see why people think "Free" and "Easy to use" are mutually exclusive. If Firefox required people to run
./configure;make;make install
on Windows to get it running (not to mention dealing with missing dependencies) it wouldn't have the marketshare it has today.
If OSS wants to become truly mainstream the people creating it need to focus on the experience, not just the code