I love Linux, having run it as my primary desktop for the last 9 or 10 years, but I am sick of dealing with dependency and forward/backward compatibility issues. I wish software could be distributed in discrete components that could be relied upon to work. Is this such an unreasonable request? Why is it so hard?
The average new computer today probably has a life time of 5-6 years. I think it is probably unreasonable to expect normal end users to upgrade their OS. This is partially true because of the technical complexity of upgrading, and because of the bigger picture issue that upgrading is likely to break many of the existing apps they might have installed and come to depend on.
I upgraded my system to RedHat 6.2 a mere 2 1/2 years ago. It is now just reaching the point where most of the security holes have been shaken out, and I am beginning to feel I can trust it to be solid and reliable. But it is also at the point where it is ceasing to work as a platform for applications. I am running into dependency and forward/backward compatibly problems with perhaps 50% of new applications I might want to install. Worse I am told RedHat 6.2 is about to EOL, and future releases will have a drastically shorter supported life time.
Likewise, I never asked for an apache 2.0. I was part of the minority 98% of users for whom Apache 1.x did everything we ever needed it to do, and I just wanted Apache to keep doing it. And so now, great, I have something better, with which none of the plugins work. The problem is the free software community is too developer driven. Who could have stood up and said to the Apache developers, no we don't want a 2.0, it will break existing plugins, and if you build it we won't ship it, all we want of Apache development is for you to fix a few minor bugs in the current implementation.
Companies like Sun and IBM understand these issues. RedHat is beginning to understand these issues with their enterprise products. But the broader Linux community seems so developer heavy it completely misses it.
Linux fails as an application platform because developers keep breaking things.
In order for Linux to win, it needs more enforceable end user push back against developers changing and breaking things. Then we will be able to develop applications we can rely on, rather than running to stay in place.