Package managers assume they own the entire system. When you use something like Debian, which tends to have older versions of things, and want to run something

Package managers assume they own the entire system. When you use something like Debian, which tends to have older versions of things, and want to run something that wants a newer version of something fundamental like libc, you can run into problems. > whatever marginal benefit Saving developer time and factoring code multiple programs use into a library is probably more than a marginal benefit. > programs updating their own libraries works just fine Until you have a security vulnerability in something like openssl, the package management system lets you patch this vulnerability for many programs at once. You then have things like resolver and socket libraries which you probably tend to want consistent across your system. > you can always drop in a new dll yourself if it's so important It should probably be easier to override a library version locally in case you do need to do that. That probably gets into security issues, as if anything can modify library versions, it also lets malicious software hook into those libraries.