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In my opinion, this idea of shared libs should have been abandoned at least two decades ago.

I see it as a huge weakness on the GNU/Linux world because it's so widespread.




It's also a weakness in other systems IMO.

In Windows, "DLL hell" used to be a thing. It's mostly solved by (among other things) Microsoft forbidding installers from overwriting system DLLs. Also today most apps bundle the DLLs along with the apps and don't really share them.

In MacOS, brew the popular package manager recently took upon using shared libs for everything. While it mostly works it can cause some version incompatibilities, you tend to accumulate garbage in your disk after uninstalling stuff and now you have to routinely update 3x more packages...


Yeah, the idea is widespread and not unique to the Unix world, but many apps are self-contained on Windows, whereas it is quite rare on Linux, AFAIK.

Cascading dependencies are a really bad thing, containers were invented mostly to fix a bad design by adding a new layer...

The simple fact that we need an installer is a sign that something is wrong.




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