[moe]

I agree with your complaints but I don't see how it is related to the concept of distributions.

Having multiple distributions is fine; someone just needs to make one with a package manager that gets this stuff right. Then your parents can just use that one distribution and never need to care about what other distros do.

In fact, Ubuntu wants to be that one distribution that is easy for normals. But as you illustrated, it still falls short...

[muuh-gnu]

> I don't see how it is related to the concept of distributions.

Distributions freeze the set of available app versions to a specific version of the base system. You cant get a new app without upgrading everything else too, including all other apps. I cant simply get a new Emacs on my Ubuntu, because to do that, Ubuntu also wants to remove my Gnome2 and replace it with Unity.

Windows decouples the base from the apps. When you want to update an app, you just do it, everything else remains untouched. If I want to get a new Emacs on XP, it wont force me to simultaneously upgrade to 7.

Windows would have the same problems if they bundled a new set of base libs and 20000 apps that only work with that specific set of libs every few months but they dont. They invest a great effort into making the base system slow and stable and support it for a decade or more, and it shows.

[moe]

As I said. That's a problem with the package management in most distributions. It has nothing to do with the fact that we have multiple distributions.

I.e. source-based distributions (e.g. gentoo) don't have this particular problem.

[adambyrtek]

Tell this to people who ended up with broken Arch installations after the sudden upgrade to Python 3.x.

[Drbble]

That is a case of yet another pair of problems, though: Python is incompatible with itself across versions (understandable, I guess), yet it is hard to run multiple versions side by side (major flaw in Python 3 for reusing the unadorned name Python, instead of making the number part of the name or changing the name of the installed software)

[neild]

Python 3 does not reuse the unadorned name "python". It installs itself as "python3" by default. The decision to have "python" be Python 3 was solely Arch's.