>> Only as the builder of an application. The application developers for Linux, on the whole, only ever chose option one, Again, wrong. The people that packag

>> Only as the builder of an application. The application developers for Linux, on the whole, only ever chose option one, Again, wrong. The people that package distributions usually make these choices. Gentoo and distros like it give you a choice of how things are built. Off the top of my head I cannot think of a popular library that does not have the option to be statically or dynamically linked. >> I have several dozen applications on Windows that are not installed. Many of them aren't even designed to be portable, .... >> ... The DLLs, as far as I can tell, are unique to WinDirStat, so it wouldn't be unfair to say that this application actually doesn't have any dependencies other than the base OS. This works in Linux too, somewhat. You have to have compatible ABIs though. >> ... dependent DLLs in their install directory........ And Windows has 8 tons of different versions of system DLLs and C library runtimes in the WinSxS directories. MSVC runtimes are not interchangeable. Linux in general does not go to that length since a large majority of the apps are source available.