[alkonaut]

> people have to maintain them all separately.

Yes. I think most people (most people don't run Linux in any form) would like to think of their system as having a collection of independent applictions, not a set of libraries.

If people are expected to "maintain", or even understand, the concept of shared libraries, then I think the system is only geared to power users and tinkerers (the current user base more or less).

[zrm]

The people who maintain the libraries are not the users, they're the library package maintainers.

If you move the libraries into the application packages then the package maintainers for every application also have to maintain every library they use, duplicating the efforts of one another. The users then suffer when they do it poorly because they don't have the time or domain expertise to maintain multiple third party libraries in addition to their own application.