[coldtea]

>If every package was 40 MB on my computer, my distribution would be 30 GB.

Only if you had installed 750 userland programs. Which are quite a lot. And even then, 30GB for your OS + your third party programs is negligible in even a 265GB flask disk (merely 12% of it).

>More importantly, these 40 MB of code and resources expand to about 400 MB in memory when the application is running, but a global library wouldn't fix that.

Not sure where you got those metrics. Code doesn't "expand" on memory, and binary size it's not a reliable metric of how much memory it will use (a trivial 5 line program that just mallocs can use TB of memory).

For the majority of very large programs, most of the size on disk is assets, not compiled code.

[michaelmrose]

You are correct that code doesn't "expand on memory" but there is no fixed relationship between code size and memory usage. You could certainly write a tiny program that uses a ton of memory pretty easily.

[coldtea]

Yeah, I say that: "a trivial 5 line program that just mallocs can use TB of memory".