There's always a trade-off. A little extra space (which is cheap) for less developer time accounting for all the distro/library/arch combinations. I think it's

There's always a trade-off. A little extra space (which is cheap) for less developer time accounting for all the distro/library/arch combinations. I think it's a very fair trade since space gets cheaper by the year and time does the opposite. One working example of this type of system is RacherOS[1] which I think could do what I'm proposing. I'm excited to see it mature. People can just package their app in a minimally sized container and be done with it. I think it's what the linux community really wants anyway (modularity and options) but adds the ability to switch without re-installation from scratch. [1]http://rancher.com/rancher-os/ http://rancher.com/rancher-os/