With the help of a coworker, I’ve tried again and had much greater success.
The major problems I’ve had is lack of both general and specific documentation, rather than any technical problems. I haven’t yet found a good overview guide.
Overview: For instance, you can use apt-get, aptitude or synaptic to install packages. The only one I knew about a few days ago was apt-get, which seems to be the weakest of the tree.
Specifics: As an example, package descriptions rarely describe how a package is invoked. For instance, nowhere when installing KDE did it explain how to invoke it. I found that on my own, but wouldn’t the package description have been a logical place to put it?
I can and should have discovered this stuff on my own, but I can’t help but wish it was better documented inside the OS. This isn’t a flaw specific to Linux, although both Mac OS and Windows do a better job on it (Mac installs all its applications in a single, almost flat directory and Windows highlights new packages).
I’ve also noted some interesting flaws. Attempting to remove Evolution in synaptic listed ubuntu as a dependency. I did not proceed.
Yes, the deep-dependency problem is a problem with Debian-based distributions. The Ubuntu team has chosen to expect parts of the Evolution package in the base system (much of it’s base functinality can be used throughout Gnome). Allowing the package manager to remove Ubuntu is a huge usability bug IMO.
The documentation is also a problem, I agree. Ubuntu has two primary locations for its documentation:
The Ubuntu wiki
The Ubuntu forums
These should really be linked from the Ubuntu menus, or in the default Firefox install.
To be fair, I didn’t actually try to remove Ubuntu. Once it asked permission to do it, I said “Are you crazy?” and stopped it. Now I wish I had tried it, though. Just for giggles.
It will do as you ask, like most Unix things will. Shoot self in foot? Sure, sounds like fun! It is recoverable, though, as the system will continue to run until the next reboot. An `apt-get install ubuntu` should restore the system back to happiness.
In fact, the other day I was removing a package that depended on Gnome, and didn’t notice it. I cancelled the operation part way through the removal (meaning a few packages were already removed), and re-installed the meta package. All was happy.