Shawn Powers has a new article up on the Linux Journal site, “Linux, Where Crapware Goes to Die“.
It’s a good article all around, but he makes a brilliant point that somehow had never struck me:
Linux Apps Come Pre-vetted!
Go ahead, try to run ‘apt-get install BonziBuddy’ — it won’t work! Linux distributions come with thousands of programs, of varying usefulness, that you can install all day long. Those packages have all been vetted by communities of people before they ever get to your package manager. In fact, while one of the rally cries of Windows supporters is that the selection of software is so much greater for Windows — it begs the question of whether or not that’s a good thing.
Yes, there are 100 applications you can buy, or try, or demo, or evaluate, or install for free on Windows for any given task. One of the big problems, however, is that no one determines if they are any good. Google may be a great search engine to find Windows apps, but it certainly isn’t a good quality assurance method for picking Windows software. As Linux users, we not only have a community of developers making free and open source applications for us to use, we also have a community of users that make sure spyware and malware don’t make it into our software repositories. So the next time someone asks why the Linux community is so important and we make such a big deal out of “community”, tell them it’s because we all help keep out purple apes.
Recent Comments