Then you picked the wrong example in Post #106 with Bugzilla and MySQL, since the average user will not be installing those particular apps.
With the introduction of that scenario, people assumed you picked a real-world experience you had recently gone through, and attempted to explain that "RPM hell" had been solved with yum, apt, YaST, and a variety of other tools. Those are easily installled on any distro regardless of whether they originally shipped with that distro.
For instance, apt ships with Debian, but I have it running on my Fedora box alongside yum, to take advantage of the different repositories. This particular setup will not be done by the average user, but the average user probably isn't as interested in the range of apps I am interested in.
huh the stuff you were referring to was
It wasn't in my environment. I was configuring some software (bugzilla, CVS, mySQL, etc) for one of my colleagues at a local university using Red Hat 9.
Grandma is running Bugzilla, CVS, and a Database Server on a 3yo OS?
Your coming apart, you started by saying installing software is hard, I point out that with Fedora, Suse, RH and others you can just click on a link in a webpage (to install NVU, Mozilla, or others) you can also use GYUM as a gui installer of a repository online (dag is a really good one)... You just keep showing us you dont know linux but wish you did..
Fine with me. Choose a friendly distro that ships with Apt and Synaptic. You still haven't made your case, especially since you indirectly admitted that you HAD NO IDEA THAT APT, SYNAPTIC AND YAST EVEN EXISTED. I find it hard to accept your critiques when you speak from ignorance. You sure haven't presented anything factual upon which to base your arguments.
I've used both Windows and Linux long-term, however, and can tell you that using Synaptic is far easier than finding, downloading, installing, restarting, (then, uninstalling "Shop At Home Select" when you find out you've just downloaded spyware!) etc. that is sometimes necessary with Windows. Just type in your root password and click on what you want. I can't imagine what you think is so hard about that. Are you really that challenged?
If you want to argue that RedHat 9 might be too difficult for Granny, I'd probably agree with you. Heck, that's why I use Mepis. The good part of Linux is you can try just about any OS you want and decide (Right now, I have 4 different OS's running on my computers here and the ones at work).