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Comment by rljy | Hacker News Reader

Does it even work well for go or rust executables? I seem to recall that Docker itself was written in golang because "fat binaries1111", but now docker is one of the hardest to install applications that I know of, and certainly isn't simply one executable file to be copied onto the system.

Managing resource files in fat binaries is really problematic.

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I've never had trouble installing Docker anywhere, whether from package managers or installers. Where have you, and what kind of trouble? If I might run into something similar down the road, better I should know about it now.

It used to be that docker could be installed literally by downloading the docker binary, then it was a single curl command. Now the documentation looks like this: https://www.docker.com/get-docker

You press "get docker community image". Then you find your distro. Go to "download from the docker store", discover that there is no dowload link https://store.docker.com/editions/community/docker-ce-server... then you click on the long form link to the docs. Which gets you here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/linux/docker-ce/...

And then that is not simple at all.

So much for fat binaries making things easy. Good-ness grief.

Adding a package repository and installing some packages doesn't seem that hard, and the major distros - and at least some minor ones; I see mention of Mint there - are supported. I've never had to do more than that, and it hasn't seemed especially objectionable; I have to confess I'm still not seeing where the additional burden arises.

If you simply want the latest stable docker version, try:

  curl -o /tmp/get-docker.sh https://get.docker.com && bash /tmp/get-docker.sh

or even just

  curl https://get.docker.com | bash

You can also use this script to update to the latest version, if you previously used it to install.

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