Comment by nixdev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nixdev | Hacker News Reader

Many distros avoid the problem with something like

  apt-get install libflac7 libflac8

If you look in Fedora 40 for example, you'll find nodejs, nodejs18, and nodejs22. Gentoo's ebuilds (packages) can often have multiple major versions installed simultaneously. If I really need something, I can unpack another Gentoo userland, or use a container.

AppImages, do exist. What seems to be the missing "glue" is putting a ui in front of users to choose what software they want to run. That problem has not yet been solved gracefully.

The author says he knows how to use Linux, but observably never graduated to be a particularly advanced user.

This was not my argument. Maybe I presented it poorly. I agree with you on different versions being available, but that is not always the case. And in those cases you need to do some unsavory things with symlinking.

It is not about graduating to being an advanced user. That's not the case at all. I know how to do it. I expect an advanced system to not force me to do it. That is my argument.

I don't think this will ever be solved. And that's ok, as well.

I think operating systems have been around long enough that this kind of things could have been resolved.

And Windows have the same issues. DLL's missing etc. This is not isolated to just Linux. And developers of applications have also a blame to carry here. I have done this as well.

edit: not even an advanced system, it's about how we package apps. That's probably a better way of saying it.

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