Comment by forrestthewoods
6 months ago
It’s a bloody shame that Linux is incapable of reliable running software programs without layers and layers of disparate, competing abstractions.
I’m increasingly convinced that the mere existence of a package manager (for programs, not source code) is a sign of a failed platform design. The fact that it exists at all is a miserable nightmare.
Flatpak and Snap tried to make this better. But they do too much which just introduced new problems.
Steam does not have this problem. Download game, play game. Software is not that complicated.
> Steam does not have this problem. Download game, play game. Software is not that complicated.
Steam on Linux essentially has its own "package manager" which uses containerized runtimes: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools
The Steam Linux Runtime is pretty bare bones. Their most recent runtime hasn’t been updated in 4 years. That’s quite different.
> Their most recent runtime hasn’t been updated in 4 years. That’s quite different.
Bad, even.
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> I’m increasingly convinced that the mere existence of a package manager (for programs, not source code) is a sign of a failed platform design.
Nix is a build system for source code, similar to make. It is such a robust build system that it also can be used as a package manager with a binary cache
Does Steam let you control the whole dependency tree of your software, including modifying any part of it and rebuilding from source as necessary, or pushing it to a whole other machine?
Real life software is much more than just downloading a game and running it.
Pushing to another machine? Yes. By strict definition. Steam exists to sell pre-compiled proprietary programs for dollars.
Rebuilding? No. Linux package management is so-so at allowing you to compile programs. But they’re dogshit garbage at helping you reliably run that program. Docker exists because Linux can’t run software.
Docker (and also Nix) exists because it's not trivial to manage the whole environment needed to run an application.
There's a reason everyone uses it for ops these days, and not some Windows thing.
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> Real life software is much more than just downloading a game and running it.
Real life software outside of Linux is pretty much just downloading and running it. Only in Linux we don't have a single stable OS ABI, forcing us to find the correct package for our specific distro, or to package the software ourselves.
Maybe for desktop use but when you want to deploy something to your server it's a bit more complicated than that.
> I’m increasingly convinced that the mere existence of a package manager (for programs, not source code) is a sign of a failed platform design
> Steam does not have this problem. Download game, play game.
These statements seem contradictory. Steam is a package manager. So is the Apple App Store. Sure, they have different UX than, say, apt/dnf/brew/apk/chocolatey, but they're conceptually package managers.
Given that, I'm unclear what the gripe is (though I'm totally down to rip on Snap/Flatpak; I won't rant here, but I did elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069483). Is the issue with OS/vendor-maintained package managers? Or is the issue with package installers that invoke really complicated build systems at install time (e.g. package managers that install from source)?
This is getting into semantics. Personally I would not consider downloading a zip file from a GitHub releases page in a web browser to be using a “package manager”. But someone could try and make that argument.
None of this has formal definitions which makes it difficult to discuss.
Your rant on Snap/Flatpak was great.
The core gripe is that I want running computer programs on Linux to be easy and reliable. It is not. MacOS and Windows are far more reliable, and they don’t require (imho) package managers to do it.
> The core gripe is that I want running computer programs on Linux to be easy and reliable. It is not.
No argument here.
What's interesting, though, is that package managers on Linux are the attempted solution to that problem. Without them, hand-managing dependencies and dependency discovery via the "download a zipfile from GitHub" approach just falls apart: said zipfile often wants to link against other libraries when it launches.
Windows (and runtimes like Golang) take a batteries-included approach by vendoring many/most dependency artifacts with binary distributions. MacOS app bundles do a bit of that, and also have a really consistent story about what system-level dependencies are available (which is only a feasible approach for MacOS because there's a single maintainer and distributor of the system).
But even on those platforms, things break down a lot! There are all sorts of problems for various Windows apps that need to be solved by "acquire so-and-so.dll and copy it into this app's install folder, or else its vendored version of that dll will break on your system". Homebrew on MacOS exists (and has highly variable complexity levels re: installation/dependency discovery) precisely because the amount of labor required to participate in the nice app bundle/MacOS native-app ecosystem is too great for many developers.
That said, there's not really a punchline here. It's complicated, I guess?
> Your rant on Snap/Flatpak was great.
Thank you!