[ Thanks to Borys
Musielak for this link. ]
“GNU/Linux is known for its diversity and freedom of choice.
There are multiple window managers and desktop environments, many
competing systems for handling sound, graphics and hardware
autodetection. This diversity is the power and weakness of free
software. Exactly the same problem concerns installing software in
GNU/Linux. There are currently at least 5 popular ways of doing
it:
- “Installing directly from source code,
- “Ports-based installation (where the source packages are held
in a repository and can be automatically downloaded, compiled and
installed), like BSDs ports of Gentoo’s portage…”