Comment by chpatrick
10 hours 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.
> 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.
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.