> I am specifically talking about the Linuxism where systems have a global pool of shared libraries in one of several common locations (that ever so slightly differs across distros because fuck you).

> Windows and macOS don’t do this.

macOS does in fact have a /usr/lib. It's treated as not to be touched by third parties, but there's always a /usr/local/lib and similar for distributing software that's not bundled with macOS just like on any other Unix operating system. The problem you're naming is just as relevant to FreeBSD Ports as it is to Debian.

And regardless, it's not a commitment Nix shares, and its problems are not problems Nix suffers from. It's not at all inherent to package management, including on Linux. See Nix, Guix, and Spack, for significant, general-purpose, working examples that don't fundamentally rely on abstractions like containers for deployment.

I totally agree with this, though, and so does everyone who's into Nix:

> Stuffing a million libraries into /usr/lib [...] is bad.

> I don’t blame Linux for making bad decisions. It was the 80s and no one knew better. But it is indeed an extremely bad set of design decisions. We all live with historical artifacts and cruft. Not everything is a trade off.

> Windows and macOS don’t do this. I don’t pollute system32 with a kajillion random ass DLLs.

You can't be serious. Are you not familiar with the phrase "DLL hell"? Windows applications do indeed put and depend on random ass DLLs in system32 to this day. Install any game, and it will dump random DLLs all over the system. Want to run an app built with Visual C++, or which depends on C++ libraries? Good luck tracking down whatever version of the MSVC runtime you need to install...

Microsoft and the community realized this is a problem, which is why most Windows apps are now deployed via Chocolatey, Scoop, WinGet, or the MS Store.

So, again, your argument is nonsensical when focused on Linux. If anything, Linux does this better than other operating systems since it gives the user the choice of how they want to manage applications. You're not obligated to use any specific package manager.