[marssaxman]

It's easy to see why sysadmin types like shared libraries, even though that ability is an accidental side-effect of an architecture originally developed as a way to save disk space, but as an end user I strongly prefer isolated applications which depend only on the base OS. Updating one program and thereby inadvertently updating a bunch of other unrelated programs is an anti-feature for me as an end user, because it means I can't trust the state of my system. I don't want to waste time figuring out why things no longer work the way they used to; I want to keep on using my computer for its intended purposes. Therefore I, as an end user, update software as infrequently as possible, and only do so when I don't have anything else I need to do with the computer for the rest of the day, just in case I have to waste a bunch of time figuring out why things don't work anymore.

If I were a sysadmin, and maintaining the computer were my job, this would not be a problem, because figuring out why things don't work and fixing them is what I would be trying to use the computer for; but as an end-user, I just want things to work.

If every application were built with static linking, and system libraries only updated with an explicit system upgrade, I would be much more likely to upgrade frequently, because it would be possible to know and limit the scope of churn implied by any given upgrade act.