[gunapologist99]

Disk space is cheap, particularly when we're talking about libs that consume a few hundred kb each.

On the other hand, software distributions should continue to rely on shared libraries, for their own software, but third-party compiled apps that are intended to be cross-distro/cross-arch should try to bundle as much as possible.

This is why I prefer /opt over /usr/local for third-party compiled apps.

[ludocode]

Maybe. Apps wouldn't have to bundle their own versions of libraries if those libraries actually cared about backwards compatibility. Bundling is just an unfortunate workaround for libraries continually breaking their ABI.

Windows 10 can run virtually all apps compiled against Windows 2000 just fine, and those apps did not have to bundle their own graphical toolkits. Windows has gone through several new toolkits but they always preserve the old ones so that old programs continue to work.

By contrast GTK has regularly broken things between even minor version updates. Distributions also drop the old major versions of toolkits much more quickly. GTK3 was first released in 2011, but by 2018 most distributions no longer provided GTK2 pre-installed.

Is it any wonder that no one can ship and maintain a binary app that targets GTK without bundling it? Of course bundling sure looks like an attractive solution in this environment, but it's the environment that's the problem.

[binarybanana]

>Windows 10 can run virtually all apps compiled against Windows 2000 just fine, and those apps did not have to bundle their own graphical toolkits.

They do if they're buildtusing Qt, GTK, WxWidgets, etc. Also shipping DirectX and VC++ runtime libraries, .NET runtimes, etc. was and still is (for whatever reason) still common and stuff just doesn't work without it. Plus whatever else the program needs, like a whole python runtime or something.

>Is it any wonder that no one can ship and maintain a binary app that targets GTK without bundling it?

Distributions have no problem doing it. If you're shipping something outside the distribution why would you ever expect that shipping only half your program would be feasible? There is no OS where that works.

[snovv_crash]

There are many distributions. Packaging your app for all of them isn't feasible. Including all the dependencies right down to glibc is.