Dynamic linking isn't the issue. Shared libraries are the issue. You could bundle a bunch of .so files with your executable & stick it in a directory, and have

Dynamic linking isn't the issue. Shared libraries are the issue. You could bundle a bunch of .so files with your executable & stick it in a directory, and have the executable link using those. That's basically how Windows does it, and it's why there's no "dependency hell" there despite having .dlls (dynamically linked libraries) all over the place. Shared libraries are shared (obviously) and get updated, so they're mutable. Linux systems depend on a substantial amount of shared mutable state being kept consistent. This causes lots of headaches, just as it does in concurrent programming.