For a system I'm going to keep and use in multiple ways, dynamic linking is wonderful. Save time building and upgrading, and save memory using the various apps.

For a system I'm going to keep and use in multiple ways, dynamic linking is wonderful. Save time building and upgrading, and save memory using the various apps. For a base image for VMs or containers I'm going to build automatically and throw away on demand anyway, a slightly longer build time to statically link things won't hurt. The memory utilization penalty should also be small, because those should only be running one application or a couple at most.