every once in a while i flirt with the idea of installing windows 10 on my laptop thinking maybe it's better... then i read stuff like this and associated comments and quickly dispense of the idea.

why doesn't windows have real package management yet?

I honestly have an easier time installing software on windows than I do on Linux. This is in general when it comes to many tools. I know package management seems like a solved or "mostly" solved problem on Linux as opposed to windows, but its not all rainbows and butterflies.

Just a small example I encountered just recently: Look at the install page for docker. Curl, pipe to some random folder, mix in some sudo access, then finally can I "install" the docker package.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/

That is mostly due to the company (Docker) not doing it the usual way. Normally they should have a build server, and then have a few line install. First is to add their repository, second is to install the software. From then on you just use your normal distributions update system. (Such as for example https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=hardware....) The real issue is that many companies choose to not do it the right way, and instead come up with weird new installation ways. When they do the same on Windows it just works because there is only one Windows, but there are multiple Linux distributions. As Windows begins to support Arm, and Apple moves to Arm (meaning more targets to support), I suspect that currently Linux specific issues will become more universal.

Have you ever tried creating a debian package from scratch? It's not a fun experience.

1. Docker doesn't have to create anything ‘from scratch’ to package for Debian, Ubuntu, etc.— it's already in Debian

2. They are running their own apt repos already anyway! The thing the grandparent commenter is complaining about is part of normal apt usage. It's not a manual installation of some piece of Docker, just a normal part of configuring apt in order to install something that is, in fact, properly packaged.

> . Docker doesn't have to create anything ‘from scratch’ to package for Debian, Ubuntu, etc.— it's already in Debian

But the version is fixed per Debian release, which means that by its EOL it will be obsolete ( it's Docker, not a database, having the latest and greatest is a huge bonus). The whole point of custom repositories is to ship independently of the OS release cycle.

This is where Flatpak and Snapcraft can help you out. Just bring all dependencies with the binaries. But then people complain that dependencies aren't up2date and how they're a security nightmare because they aren't packaged by the Debian team.

I have high hopes for Flatpak and Nix.

Incidentally, there is a Snap for Docker, but it's older than the one in the new Ubuntu 20.04 beta:

  snap info docker | tail 

vs. the Ubuntu one:

  apt info docker.io 2>/dev/null | head -2

That's the same as the version in the latest nixpkgs unstable:

  nix search nixpkgs '^docker$'                                                                                      15:41:11

Also, afaict Nixpkgs doesn't expose any unit files for the Docker daemon, so it'd take a bit of monkeying around with a new package definition to expose the one from the Moby source so that you could use it on some random distro (or you could write your own). Nix doesn't currently have any system-wide module system for managing services on non-NixOS Linux, unfortunately.

Both docker and flatpak are quite new in comparision to APT. Nix isn't really new, but gained traction lately, so in comparision to APT i would say It too is "new". We're not there yet, but i i believe shipping your dependencies with your application is how it'll all pan out for a lot of things. Even if it's a security nightmare not being able to update the dependencies for the entire system.

EDIT: And being new, there facilities aren't as mature, userbase smaller, so not enough work is put into packaging the latest versions. Since they also take on the goal of sandboxing the barrier for entry might be higher.

But I think the main barrier to running Docker from Nix on non-NixOS is the lack of a systemd unit file or other init system configuration in Nixpkgs. Nixpkgs just doesn't have any facilities for that atm and afaict no one is working on them right now. There are definitely precursors to that functionality in:

• the NixOS module system, which provides exactly this functionality for NixOS, where the module system is in charge of configuring systemd

• home-manager, a module system like NixOS which adds support for systemd user services on non-NixOS: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

• nix-processmgmt, an experimental Nix framework for writing Nix expressions to describe services to be managed by a range of process managers that may or may not be PID 1 (which means the could be usable on non-NixOS): https://github.com/svanderburg/nix-processmgmt

• nix-darwin, a module system for macOS that provides some NixOS functionality, including managing services: https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin

The discussion on the service abstraction layer for Nixpkgs/NixOS is also very relevant. It shows that there has been interest in something like this for many years, but it's never quite come together: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/26067

I wouldn't assume it's just around the corner or inevitable. It is a really exciting possibility, though, and the nix-processmgmt framework seems like something that could evolve into a service abstraction layer for Nixpkgs that could make facilities for managing services available in a uniform way even on non-NixOS Linux.