[rlpb]

Your apt update would still be huge though. When the dependency changes (eg. a security update) you’d be downloading rebuilds of 20 apps. For the update of a key library, you’d be downloading your entire distribution again. Every time.

[staticassertion]

Oh, well yeah, statically linked binaries have that downside. I guess I don't think that's a big deal, but I could maybe imagine on some devices that are heavily constrained that it could be? IDK. Compression is insanely effective.

[daurentius523]

You are forgetting about elephant in the room - if every bug require rebuild of downstream then it is not only question of constraint it is also question of SSD cycles - you are effectively destroying someone drive faster. And btrfs actually worsens this problem - because instead of one Copy on Write of library you now have 2n copies of library within 2 copies of different apps. Now (reverting/ø) update will cost you even more writes. It is just waste for no apparent reason - less memory, less disk space.

"compression is insanely effective" - And what about energy? compression will increase CPU use. It will also make everything slower - slower than just plain deduplication. Also, your reason for using worse for user tech is: the user can mitigate in other ways? This strikes me as the same logic as "we don't need to optimize our program/game, users will just buy better hardware" or just plain throwing cost to user - this is not valid solution just downplaying of the argument.

[jabl]

If Rust and static linking were to become much more popular, Linux distros could adopt some rsync/zsync like binary diff protocol for updates instead of pulling entire packages from scratch.

[hamandcheese]

NixOS "suffers" from this. It's really not that bad if you have solid bandwidth. For me it's more than worth the trade off. With a solid connection a major upgrade is still just a couple minutes.

[rlpb]

A couple of minutes at the moment that is, with dynamic linking everywhere. What will it become when everything is statically linked?