That is an extremely misleading figure. Shared memory is page-aligned entire libraries dropped into RAM First of all, I seriously doubt it (haven't looked clos

That is an extremely misleading figure. Shared memory is page-aligned entire libraries dropped into RAM First of all, I seriously doubt it (haven't looked closely, but if library-loading is similar to mmap, it should only count actually used segments). But that shouldn't even matter, as most of these libraries are fully utilized. All of libc is used collectively by 400+ processes, that is also true for the complex multi-layer GUI machinery. The output of ldd $(which gnome-calculator) is terrifying, run it under a profiler and see how many functions get hit, you'll be amazed. Put the cold hard numbers right in front of someone's face and still the cargo cult wins out. The coldness of your numbers did not impress. And calling a reasonable engineering trade-off "cargo cult" doesn't get you any points either. Static linking is better than dynamic linking. Sometimes. And vice versa. That's how engineering is different from science, there are no absolute truths, only trade-offs.