Comment by panzi
3 years ago
How do Firefox and Blender do it? They just provide compressed archives, which you uncompress into a folder and run the binary, no problem. I myself once had to write a small CLI program in Rust, where I statically linked musl. I know, can't compare that with OpenGL stuff, but Firefox and Blender do use OpenGL (and perhaps even Vulkan these days?).
Firefox maintains an Flatpak package on Flathub. Flatpak uses runtimes to provide a base layer of provided libraries that are the same regardless which distro you use.
https://beta.flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.firefox
with difficulty, and not that well. for example, firefox binaries require gtk built with support for X, despite only actually using wayland at runtime if configured. the reason why people generally don't complain about it is because if you have this sort of weird configuration, you can usually compile firefox yourself, or have it compiled by your distro. with binary-only releases, all complaints (IMO justifiably) go to the proprietary software vendors.
I’m happy to blame the OS vendors for not creating a useable base env, I think that’s one of the core tenants for an OS and not providing it is a problem. It may be easier and may push an ideological agenda but I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.
Firefox has a binary they ship in a zip which is broken but they also officially ship a Flatpak which is excellent.
Not sure what you mean; I've been using the Firefox zip for over a decade now with zero problems.
The irony of this comment/response pair being in this thread is delightful.