Comment by bsimpson
1 month ago
I only learned about glibc earlier today, when I was trying to figure out why the Nix version of a game crashes on SteamOS unless you unset some environ vars.
Turns out that Nix is built against a different version of glibc than SteamOS, and for some reason, that matters. You have to make sure none of Steam's libraries are on the path before the Nix code will run. It seems impractical to expect every piece of software on your computer to be built against a specific version of a specific library, but I guess that's Linux for you.
No, that's every bit of software out there. Dynamic linking really does cause that problem even though allegedly it has security benefits as the vendor is able to patch software vulnerabilities.
NixOS actually is a bit better in this respect since most things are statically linked. The only thing is that glibc is not because it specifically requires being dynamically linked.
This issue also applies to macOS with their Dylibs and also Windows with their DLLs. So saying that this is an issue with Linux is a bit disingenuous.
Until everybody standardizes on one singular executable format that doesn't ever change, this will forever be an issue.