Well said. Dynamically linked packages managed by a package manager and created and distributed by maintainers is the Linux Way of doing things for multiple ver

Well said. Dynamically linked packages managed by a package manager and created and distributed by maintainers is the Linux Way of doing things for multiple very good reasons. In fact, the article brilliant describes one of them: > Modern software distribution: AKA "actually free with no-ads apps store" of the Linux and BSD worlds. That's it. That's the advantage summed up in a single description that wasn't even intended as a description of the advantages of the current way of doing things! The article has a list of "cons", but it utterly fails to consider the possibility that this overwhelming advantage of what it calls "modern software distribution" is simply and inescapably tied to the maintainer-oriented approach that currently underlies it! Attempts to create modes of distribution that are even slightly different from maintainer-distribution (think Google Play) suck ass. For all its faults, F-droid is a vastly better platform because it insists that the software must be built and distributed by an F-droid maintainer. Stepping even further away into the realm of developer built opaque binaries is begging for chaos and misery. As you say, it's ultimately a security concern [1]. The article claims that a change is necessary because of "increased usage of languages and run-times that don't fit the current build model", "some of these new projects have large numbers ... of dependencies", but these are themselves problems with modern software development. Even putting aside distribution, bloated nodejs dependency trees create security vulnerabilities. The inability to develop software without pinning exact versions of your dependencies (which then need to be manually upgraded by the developer) creates security vulnerabilities and fragility. These are problems, not good reasons for changing our current way of distributing software! I'm convinced that there are some (like me) willing to die on this particular hill. Come what may, even if half of the developers out there switch to Go and only ship static binaries, we're going to continue working on and using traditional Linux distributions with maintainer controlled software. (To be clear: Go and static builds are warranted in many cases. For example, closed-source rarely updated software like games, and software that is "deployed" rather than installed. But these are not the base case for Linux distributions.) Further reading: http://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/ http://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/ [1] https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2021/02/19/the-modern-packagers-security-nightmare/ https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2021/02/19/the-modern-packag...