In another thread I defended the menu icon for the terminal, because I don't like dumbed down devices. But letting newbies install random debs by clicking on them is too dangerous even in my opinion. Being forced to use dpkg, at least they need to think about what they're doing a bit more.

Maemo may soon be the number 1 Linux distro, so making life more difficult for trojans should be taken seriously. This isn't a case of dumbing down in my opinion, but obviously it can't be taken too far. I'd draw the line at not allowing people to add repos through the GUI. That becomes too stupid.

shapeshifter, you've got "thanks" from me because of the bunny.

Installing an app by clicking or picking it up from a menu seems natural to me.
This is the way things are done on almost every OS and the appmanager has plenty annoying popups about safety.

If we're to be concerned about safety, then let's make the easy installation of .debs possible with a commandline or a mini-app like rootsh.
But having more installation files and having to "dpkg" them all really makes no sense to me.

Having used WM since it was released and Android for over a year, installing from a deb file would seem natural, but apparently Maemo is more "volatile" in regards to the potential of messing the device up and then requiring time and additional posts here to correct. People will be less likely to help since people have been warned.

One of the hazards of having an open OS, but everything it seems in life has both good and bad points. The good for Maemo and the N900 outweigh the bad IMO.

It does to most people who don't know any better. It is however, a crap approach and always has been, it's just hard to do any better with proprietary software (not impossible, just hard). Free OSes can, and therefore do, use the massively superior solution of central application repositories.

Installing individual debs is a non-obvious procedure because you shouldn't normally be doing it; we have a better way.

im with bec here. gui all yhe way. some people in this forum think they know it all when theyve learned a bit about terminal

Really; the point here isn't "use the terminal" it's "don't do that, it's daft".

The main reason I can see for forcing people to use the command line is that it will force them to learn about the OS etc. Giving users the ability to just spam software onto their machine at the click of the button leaves a much greater potential for disaster.

I like a GUI as much as the next guy, but command line is and always will be king.

This is unfortunately why Red Pill needs to go... because it's too "easy" to use.

The only people who should be using Red Pill mode.. are people that are intimately familiar with the command line anyway.. because it is very likely you could cause problems with your precious "GUI" in Red Pill mode on your device that you will need to drop to a shell to fix anyway.

This is my understanding. Red Pill should never have been used as a "Oh, just use Red Pill to get that." Much like just telling someone to run and grab something from extras-devel.... because hey, it's harmless in there! Making a GUI for advanced things has always been an iffy development.. because then non-advanced people start clicking things they don't fully understand - and then expect the real advanced users to just "fix it" for them.

I agree with a poster that if someone wants a package, they'll get the package, but I think for most users being required to drop a shell to do something screams at the user "This is probably something I need to be careful with.." more so than a few clicks in a nifty gui and voila - all kinds of apps a user has no need to mess with..

I've always wondered how many people with "problematic" devices here, didn't bring some (if not all) of their problems onto themselves with apps such as this one, and since there is no GUI to fix them, they don't know how.