[forrestthewoods]

The number of things that can't be shipped is extremely small. And I don't think that Docker is a silver bullet for Wayland vs X11 issues? Although I'm not sure about the fine details as I don't have a ton of experience there. Shouldn't you be using an abstraction that can automatically support which ever is available?

I tend to ship code that needs to run on Linux + macOS + Windows + Android. So Docker is a total non-option. And it's totally fine! Very easy in fact.

[mook]

It's the same thing everywhere — there are some dependencies you can't ship. On Linux, you can't ship the window server (because you need to share it with all of the other apps also running). On mac, you can't ship Core Foundation. On Windows, kernel32.dll etc. I assume Android is similar — I haven't tried figuring out what a purely static app on Android would be, since I think the bootstrap is Dalvik…

It's literally impossible to _not_ depend on the system path.

[forrestthewoods]

Let me rephrase. If a dependency can be bundled then it should be bundled.

The "Linux Way" is to depend on a bunch of random garbage pooped by lord knows bullshit script into one of several global search paths. This is bad, stupid, and wrong. Programs should include as many of their dependencies as is possible.

The number of dependencies that a program can not deploy and must assume are provided by the system are extremely minimal and special case. It's a short and static list.

In general no script or program should add libraries into the global search paths. On Windows user programs do not add random crap to System32. On Linux the existence of /usr/lib is an abomination that should not exist.

Is that better? I'm fairly certain you understand what I'm trying to say.

[skydhash]

I know that the Linux way is not perfect, but I don't know how companies can't do better than the distro maintainers. Most repositories packages are driven by some kind of build scripts. I don't expect it would be that hard of a job to create one for your software for the most popular ones. Anyone using obscure distros are familiar enough with Linux to do container or chroot environments. I like the fact that my environment is a complete one, not siloes where the developer is more than happy to let the software lingers. At least macOS force developers to upgrade, Microsoft's backward compatibility's promise is keeping so much crust around in the system.