[chriselrod]

What do you have in mind for "outside the lines"? Gaming?

I've found the opposite. I'm a grad student, and my department assigned me to a computer with Windows 7. I found it incredibly counter-intuitive and difficult to do things as simple as navigating to hidden directories or opening files therein, let alone anything even slightly further outside the lines of what my grandpa would use a computer for. It felt like Windows deliberately obfuscated everything, hiding it behind smoke and mirrors for the sake of a "friendlier" facade. Which makes it all the more frustrating -- why would someone go out of their way to make my life more difficult? The old saying that the "free" in "free software" is about freedom really hit home after my experiences. Linux never got in my way.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> What do you have in mind for "outside the lines"? Gaming?

How do I put an application on a different disk?

> I found it incredibly counter-intuitive and difficult to do things as simple as navigating to hidden directories or opening files therein

View->Hidden Items. Admittedly, such a thing shouldn't be necessary, but Linux has the exact same mechanism for hiding `.` files in its file explorers.

> It felt like Windows deliberately obfuscated everything, hiding it behind smoke and mirrors for the sake of a "friendlier" facade.

Funny, that's exactly how I'd describe every "easy to use" Linux Desktop I've ever encountered. And my point is that once you peek around that facade, what you find is a Rube Goldberg machine.

[j605]

> How do I put an application on a different disk?

Use a different root partition or just put it wherever you want using PREFIX when compiling and add it to your PATH.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

So either have a completely separate install or recompile your application from source (which assumes it is open source and you've got the build environment correct). Gee, isn't that convenient?

Like I said: try to color outside the lines and all that fake ease of use stuff goes away and you have to deal with the garbage pile of a system underneath.

[j605]

I don't want to go down this road but it is easier than how you make it out to be. For example matlab can be installed in $HOME even though it is proprietary because the install script takes that into account.

I got frustrated by the Windows updates and app updates that I am willing to put in that extra effort once to install something and then forget about it than try to fight the system on a daily basis.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Proprietary application developers pretty much have to do that, because there are no standards between distributions so they have to remain flexible. OSS developers don't bother because, hey, you can just recompile from source! Not that that would actually make your application portable, mind you, you'd just have different hardcoded paths.

If there was a standardized base system and AppImage was embraced for deploying applications, that would make all application developer's lives easier, proprietary or otherwise, and all that wasted effort maintaining out of date applications across distro-specific repositories could stop.