Comment by pxc

> I am specifically talking about the Linuxism where systems have a global pool of shared libraries in one of several common locations (that ever so slightly differs across distros because fuck you).

> Windows and macOS don’t do this.

macOS does in fact have a /usr/lib. It's treated as not to be touched by third parties, but there's always a /usr/local/lib and similar for distributing software that's not bundled with macOS just like on any other Unix operating system. The problem you're naming is just as relevant to FreeBSD Ports as it is to Debian.

And regardless, it's not a commitment Nix shares, and its problems are not problems Nix suffers from. It's not at all inherent to package management, including on Linux. See Nix, Guix, and Spack, for significant, general-purpose, working examples that don't fundamentally rely on abstractions like containers for deployment.

I totally agree with this, though, and so does everyone who's into Nix:

> Stuffing a million libraries into /usr/lib [...] is bad.

> I don’t blame Linux for making bad decisions. It was the 80s and no one knew better. But it is indeed an extremely bad set of design decisions. We all live with historical artifacts and cruft. Not everything is a trade off.