[otterley]

> You cannot install just any version of any application on your system, but a lot of people want that.

That's the price of shared libraries (which you're trading off for easy security updates).

If you don't like this, you're still free to run statically-linked programs.

> Steam has solved this problem by using their own package manager and their own set of 'approved' libraries that other games must link to. Steam always ships with the set of 'approved' libraries, just so that it can side-step the libraries on your system.

So it's OK for Steam to do this, but not the OS vendor? I don't follow your logic.

[FrozenCow]

This could have been solved on a different level. If the right architecture was in place Steam didn't need to solve it.

You can have multiple shared libraries of the same name, but different major versions. Applications that need the same version can use that same version. Applications that need different versions can use different versions. The package repository shouldn't be the conflicting factor.

[otterley]

Most distributions have provisions for installing multiple major versions of a shared library (they change the package name to libfooX to accommodate this).