Why is it so difficult to install some Linux packages?

Programmers hate writing documentation, especially for absolute beginners The mumbo-jumbo you are referring to, such as the output of ./configure, is extremely important. Spotting errors in error log files is easy with tools like grep. Did you know that Mac OS X is based on Unix? Underneath the pretty Apple interface, lie the familiar commands that Linux users love. Apple made Unix exceptionally user-friendly. Programmers like to write code but they hate making installers Packaging code into .DEB and .RPM files so you can install them with tools like apt-get and yum is a thankless task. It is hard to do right. Packaging is a talent separate from software development. It's so for the same reason why creating a good installer for Windows is very difficult. You have to anticipate too many things that you would never ordinarily consider. You will make a lot of friends in the open source community if you step up as a packager for their project. Writing documentation consumes a lot of time and is a talent separate from software developmentNot all programmers have that talent. It is extremely hard for an expert to write something understandable by total beginners. They would rather fix some bugs. For that reason, people who are technology writers are always welcome by open source projects. The core team members realize the importance of good documentation, but they also don't want to write it. For technologies like OpenCV and MPEG7, the audience is developers. That suggests to the programmer that you are not a beginner and so asking you to compile from source is not a big deal. But I will tell you of a few exceptions http://www.twilio.com made a product that is strictly for developers. They also made it so easy to use that any developer and even some absolute newbies can get started using it in minutes. They are the market leader now. I know of their competitors who cost less but I prefer to support a company that makes my life easier. http://www.appery.io made a product that is so simple to use that you can build a mobile app very quickly. They have hours of videos for non-developers to help them use their platform. http://www.nodejs.org comes with excellent npm package manager. It makes development on Node much easier and this helps to increase its adoption. Perl was one of the first projects to deploy something like npm. It was called http://cpan.perl.org.

This has been on a decline over the past few years. As Susam Pal's answer says, many Linux distributions (I personally use Ubuntu) now have files that are to a large extent similar to the Windows setup files. The Software Center in Ubuntu is a great place to find and install software. Even though I have been using Ubuntu for more than 3 years now, I do not go to Synaptic unless I really know what I am doing. Of course, command line officianodos prefer apt-get. You can browse for software in third-party PPAs as well and install them For those packages that absolutely need ./configure.sh (or equivalents), the output seems frightening at first, but gets easier with time. Also, any errors are generally occur in the last few lines (i.e. output generally stops when a fatal error encountered), and it should be easy to identify the issue. Googling usually helps. If your problem still persists, try the various help sites (AskUbuntu, Ubuntuforums etc.). People are online all the time and you should get help in a couple of hours. And don't tell me you've never faced problems with windows installers. Most of the installers are not verbose, and you have no idea why it doesn't work