No need to examine anything. Take a look at Windows: it does not include a single usable software. If that is what people want, I move to Mac. Also, take a look at how software are downloaded from the webpages: too much clicking, waiting, and expected user intervention. Waste of time. If it only would be Ardour, would there be no big problem. But we are talking about hundreds of programs, including the required libraries. With distributions it is a matter of a single click for thousands of programs. Summer 2002 Debian has 7 GB of source codes in 6500 program directories. The distributions could be better: because the documentation is not included, I have had to download from the original site in any case. The sites could be better: most of the time I give up and download the entire site and the entire sourceforge file folder, only because downloading N files and pages would require too much user intervention. The documentation often is not in downloadable format but distributed over tens of pages. A couple of wgets takes 15 seconds to type and I'm free for other projects. The latest program package is then easily found with the find program. Note that webbrowsers cannot provide a complete view to the site: files are hard to find and often are missed even after hours of browsing! Last, the distributions are valuable as historical archives. Many software gets old but the algorithms and technology in them may well be usable in new software. The distributions also work as reference material when coding. If software authors don't understand the usability of distributions and software archives, that is ok but they never should make it impossible for others to create the distributions and archives. Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software