[chpatrick]

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.

[forrestthewoods]

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.

[chpatrick]

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.

[forrestthewoods]

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.

[chpatrick]

Ok then where is the amazing non Linux deployment solution that everyone uses instead?

[vilunov]

> 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.

[chpatrick]

Maybe for desktop use but when you want to deploy something to your server it's a bit more complicated than that.