Chicken and egg. "many people" on Linux don't download executables and run them even if they're perfectly trusting of the source, because they'd often be linked

Chicken and egg. "many people" on Linux don't download executables and run them even if they're perfectly trusting of the source, because they'd often be linked against missing or incompatible dynamic libraries, which can lead to other problems during use. So then users are hesitant of them, so there's less of a desire to produce them in the first place (because users don't want it.) This is exacerbated by the fact static linking on Linux is complicated by historical factors and design decisions in some components like glibc. Go and Alpine Linux especially have caused a resurgence of interest in distributing static binaries. The vast majority of tools in the Go ecosystem encourage this, for instance. Really the whole conflation of and "executable application" as a "single file" is a historical mistake that we made but haven't fully let go of yet, and it's caused huge issues for users. For example, the distinction between "static linking" and "dynamic linking" largely isn't exposed to users on macOS, because they use .app bundles -- for all intents and purposes every macOS .app is "statically linked" because it can never resolve against other (possibly incompatible) dynamic libraries and it's a single file the user can manage. Then static/dynamic linking is just a technical aspect of how some amounts of code get loaded into the process, it's not a factor which impacts distribution or anything. At the end of the day, an "application" is NOT a file. It's an abstract object from the users perspective. Maybe there is a single file hiding behind the curtain, or it's a collection of files, or maybe something else entirely, but they aren't the same. Even Windows is also now moving in this direction (you can now have 'Runtimes' in Windows so that, say, a .py file and its data files can appear collectively like an .exe and be managed like a single file, with a single python runtime in the background), and Linux is too with things like AppImage, etc. Static linking is dead, long live static linking, etc etc.