Installing software on Linux has gotten progressively easier over the years, down to being downright foolproof in Ubuntu's Application Center. However, there is still the problem of each distribution relying on its own frontends and backends, and this needs to be addressed. Members from all the major Linux distributions have held several talks, and have come up with a solution which is already being implemented.
OStatic reports on the rather massive undertaking. Last week, at the SUSE offices in Nürnberg, developers from RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva and Mageia convened to talk about creating a universal installer and application store for all these various Linux distributions, bringing together various established technologies.
"More and more people in the Linux world realize that a nice application installer is needed to make the Linux platform more attractive for normal users and third party developers," explains Frank Karlitschek, "The current package managers expose way too much complexity to the end users. The normal user doesn't care about dependencies, libraries and other internals. But the user cares about things like screenshots, description texts, ratings, tags, comments, recommendation from friends and other features which current package managers don't provide."
During the talks in Nürnberg they already pretty much finalised the entire stack, and they already have a working server and frontend. Pretty impressive if you ask me - and once again proof that if you want to get things done, you just get them done, instead of talking about it for two years.
