The Version of Subversion for Hardy is a 14.X version. Hardy will run 16.x versions of Subversion, but you have to compile it yourself. It may be zero problem for you, but a typical PC user isn't interested in spending a day working out how to get 16.x subversion on their Linux system.
Again: this is not a problem"most users" are going to encounter. Most users are not power users. Internet, maybe videogames are the most "power" demanding apps average users deal with. If you want to be a power user, then yeah you're going to have to deal with that stuff.
Which is no different than Windows. The last time I used Windows on my home machine I was still doing development work on AviSynth, which meant I needed the latest and greatest Visual C studio. I was using Windows 2000 (this was about 2001) and it was a freaking nightmare to get Microsoft's own software installed in their latest OS! It was one update pack after another - go get this installer package,go get that update, then apply this other update AFTER you've done that update - it was a frakkin nightmare. Three days it took me to get my system back up and running after a reload. And I was not alone - our c developer when I was in LA (around 2000) had the same ordeal when we got him a new machine. Took him more than two days to get that damn thing in order.
How long does it take to put together a build environment in ubuntu? As long as it takes to type and run "apt-get install build-essentials."
I just installed Windows7 a few weeks back for a class, and it was similar - there's virtually nothing there when you get the machine installed, you have to go on the internet and find all this crap just to get basic functionality out of the machine. I could give a grandma a thumbdrive with ubuntu, show her how to boot from it, and she could hit the ground running. She'd still need vlc to do media stuff, but that's one click away in the software center, which is easily supported with a phone call.
If you upgrade your Linux to the latest release every 6 months, then yes, you will have recent major releases for all the packages. But there can be problems upgrading to new releases - it can break some applications, particularly if you are running commercial programs that were compiled for a particular release - sometimes even a specific kernel version.
This is not a problem with linux - this is a problem with running proprietary software which only makes itself available in binary blobs. Either get them to fix that error, or find an open source alternative and you won't have this problem.
Do you have any idea how widespread this problem is with Windows? I just finished a contract with intuit, they are still using freaking ie6 on their desktops because so much of their legacy software depends on proprietary, nonstandard behavior of that browser. The new desktops that have ie8 are essentially "broken" right out of the box, and you can't install ie6 on them - you can't "degrade" this part of the OS.
Legacy support is a huge problem in the windows world. It is with linux too - the difference here only comes down to how often you are able to fix vulnerabilities. Linux wins in that regard hands down.
This is not a one-off problem. Just start checking on the versions of other Hardy packages, or the versions of packages in the Lucid 10.04LTS distro supported until 2015.
'Scuse me, but there have been how many versions of Windows? 95. 98, me, 2k, xp... A few of them came just a couple years apart, but there was about a decade in ther where there was no "new Windows." You didn't have the option of upgrading at any price. So it's a problem because an LTS release doesn't upgrade itself to the newest packages? That's WHY they're LTS releases. If you want bleeding edge you don't marry yourself to LTS releases. LTS is supposed to be stable. That means not changing. That means not bleeding edge. It means you have a desktop that you know will be supported and mature, not that it will always be introducing new niggles and tweaks with every update. LTS releases are so companies can rest assured they won't be facing those "legacy" issues just mentioned for at least the next few years.
I am talking about the average user who just wants to get the latest release and install it. No problems on Windows. It is a problem on Linux.
No, the problem is defining "latest and greatest." In Windows, "latest and greatest" is what the high priests of your software company are willing to make availabe to you. In linux, "latest and greatest" means whatever is in the svn repository. Most popular software is also supported by individuals who do make it easy for the users of their favorite distro to just click and install, but you have the work of finding that person. Oh well.. so learn to do a ./install or learn to use google. It's much less a "problem" than not knowing when the next update is coming or ever.
If you read my post above, I say you can download the source and compile for Linux, and I also mention that if you do that, you can no longer rely on the packages manager for keeping it up-to-date. It is now your job to keep download the updated source packages and compiling. Am I wrong?
Depends, again, on what you mean by "latest and greatest." I use pan and newspost, neither of which are the latest versions in ubuntu. Pan was pretty much abandoned for a few years, but then was picked up again in the last year or so. Newspost hasn't changed much at all since probably 2005. I built newspost years ago and it still works just fine. I built pan back around 10.04 and it worked just fine for quite some time. I doubt that version would work with 12.04 because they went to gnome 3, but it didn't require a rebuild on every upgrade.
It also depends on where you put that software. If you built a flat install with everything in one big honkin' drive, then your userdata is going to get stomped on with every upgrade. That means all your installed software is going to get ripped out and brought up to sync with the latest version, whatever that might be. This is why, when you do a ./configure you make sure your custom builds go into ~/bin, not /usr/share or whatever.
But if you're just running updates and not an all out upgrade, and if you already have a newer version of something of course the package manager isn't going to update it - it can't, and you wouldn't want it to revert your newer version.
This is the kind of problem that you live with in Linux distro's like Ubuntu and Fedora and yet the problem does not exist for Windows.
Wow. Again this is so unspecific as to be unbelievable. Have you never heard of Gimp, Open Office, VLC or any of the other HUNDREDS of open source applications that run on.... wait for it... WINDOWS?
I am lost trying to follow where you are going. Yes, those packages are available on Windows, and I can install them on anything from the latest Windows 7 back to perhaps Windows 2000 in many cases. The one install package will work with all versions of Windows. I do not require a separate install package for every release of every different Distro. For most Windows programs, the issue of needing a separate installer for different versions of Windows does not exist which is what I was saying. For Linux, it is a problem that does absolutely exist.
I used Windows for quite some time. This notion about a universal installer is fallacious - every time I installed something it inevitably needed some other package of dlls from some other software. I have no doubt Microsoft has taken steps to update that, but I am also dead certain this is not a dead issue - even in 8 they are saying some certain legacy apps will no longer run. When I was doing my Windows 7 class they spent an entire week on the "features" that allow XP apps to (maybe) run in a new "xp mode." They also spent some time talking up the hypervisor and virtualisation as a means of making it sound like a "feature" that you can always run those old apps in a virtual machine - but of course you now have to install microsoft's virtualisation software, configure a vm, then install xp in that vm. And Windows8 is going to be even less compatible because the UI is pretty much an entirely new paradigm. So grandma's not going to get confused when she goes to install some recipe package from 2005 but it won't work in Win7 so she has to go to the xp vm, fire up the package installer there and then manage all these links from one OS to another? Yeah, that doesn't sound like a power user issue at all...
And let's not even get into drivers. I don't know how much hardware I was forced to upgrade those years I was using Windows. I remember at least a couple of printers and several scanners - new version of windows comes out, guess what? You need new drivers! Oh, I'm sorry.. your hardware maker no longer supports that scanner so there will be no win2k driver, time to upgrade! Oh, I'm sorry... that printer won't be supported in Windows 7....
If you want to be a power user, you're going to have to learn new skills. It's not harder than windows - it's much easier, actually - but it's different. You've got to learn to use google, and you've got to stop letting the notion of "compiling software" be something scary. Windows users are not used to thinking that way, they're used to thinking of software as something that's handed down from upon high. The whole point of open source is it isn't.