[N3WBI3]

As someone who had to do a ton of tweaking to move some of my applications from windows 98 to windows 2000 I dont see how this is different than any other OS?

Whats different is this: there is no documented ansi standard on where the passwd file should go. There is one for SQL syntax.. MS decided to break ANSI compliance..

[usgator]

someone who had to do a ton of tweaking to move windows 98 to windows 2000

These are totally different OS kernals, aren't they?  Isn't Win 2000 the first one to run without DOS while Win 98 is completely DOS based?  Win 98 is FAT32 & Win 2000 is NTFS.  Moving from 98 to 2000 in NOT an upgrade ... it's a complete install.  Pretty bad comparison, really.  Nice stretch, but that's like me saying I moved from RedHat to Suse and it was tuff.

At least you were able to move from 98 to 2000.  Try that with 2 different versions of Linux.

[Golden Eagle]

Your denials are hilarious. Not only are there well known terms for these problems in Linux, called "dependency hell"

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linux+%22dependency+hell%22&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt

and "rpm hell"

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linux+%22rpm+hell%22&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt

According to many, you can't even cut and paste reliably between two applications running on the same version of Linux! Here's a plea on Slashdot on how to do it, that resulted in 800+ responses.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/02/1832201&tid=189&tid=104&tid=4

LOL