That's only one facet of the problem Flatpak is trying to solve (and it's a feature Flatpak will use). But, there are other considerations. Docker, despite its

That's only one facet of the problem Flatpak is trying to solve (and it's a feature Flatpak will use). But, there are other considerations. Docker, despite its several negatives, has become popular because it begins to address the repeatable infrastructure needs of a service-based architecture. e.g. say I have 10,000 servers. I can't possibly manage them all individually. The performance of using something like Kickstart to deploy them would be problematic, and each of them has a well-defined role, so having a pre-defined image (that can evolve over time) begins to make more sense. One of the things Docker got right was taking the concept of a package up a level of abstraction; so now you don't install Apache and a million other things to get your web server deployment...you install a specific bundle of things in a pre-defined image. Maybe even an immutable image that is identical on every one of your several thousand web servers (or containers or VMs, whatever). Being immutable provides some security and maintenance benefits. Being in a compressed/snapshot-able image provides deployment speed benefits and maintenance benefits. Providing dependency management at both the individual package (like RPM/deb) level and at the higher container level is also a benefit. Docker doesn't do anything along those lines (and can't, given it's implementation). This would strap into a configuration management system nicely, as well. All of it is possible the previous way. I love RPM/yum. I love Kickstart. I love Ansible (or Puppet or Chef or Salt). Those are great tools, and you can build a repeatable infrastructure using them. But, this is another layer of abstraction, and it will enable a lot of cool stuff going forward. And, soname is still part of the equation. You've got to build these runtimes. You've got to have some way of building and versioning all the software that is in them. And, you're not going to put 30 versions of OpenSSL in a runtime...you just need the latest version with the correct ABI version compatibility for the stuff you're building against it and distributing for it.