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A comment on Closing the Nix Gap: From Environments to Packaged Applications for Rust. Parent comment

Re:Closing the Nix Gap: From Environments to Packaged Applic... by chpatrick on Friday August 22, 2025 @08:11PM (#44991585)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Closing the Nix Gap: From Environments to Packaged Applic... by forrestthewoods on Friday August 22, 2025 @08:18PM (#44991639)
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.

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Re:Closing the Nix Gap: From Environments to Packaged Applic... by chpatrick on Saturday August 23, 2025 @05:51PM (#44999423)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Closing the Nix Gap: From Environments to Packaged Applic... by forrestthewoods on Sunday August 24, 2025 @09:04PM (#45009246)
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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Re:Closing the Nix Gap: From Environments to Packaged Applic... by chpatrick on Monday August 25, 2025 @09:23AM (#45013589)
Ok then where is the amazing non Linux deployment solution that everyone uses instead?
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Re:Closing the Nix Gap: From Environments to Packaged Applic... by vilunov on Friday August 22, 2025 @10:04PM (#44992339)
> 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.

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Re:Closing the Nix Gap: From Environments to Packaged Applic... by chpatrick on Saturday August 23, 2025 @10:03AM (#44996070)
Maybe for desktop use but when you want to deploy something to your server it's a bit more complicated than that.
[ Parent | on HN ]