Comment by chpatrick
6 months ago
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.
Yes. The reason is that Linux made very bad design decisions.
> it’s not trivial to manage the whole environment needed to run the application
This is a distinctly Linux problem. Despite what Linux would lead you to believe it is not actually hard to run a computer program.
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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.