> In the old world, disk space was limited and download speeds were slow No, the problem is that production systems need to receive fine-grained and timely sec

> In the old world, disk space was limited and download speeds were slow No, the problem is that production systems need to receive fine-grained and timely security updates. You can't rebuild, test and deploy a whole OS every time a vulnerability in OpenSSL is fixed. It would be extremely risky for any non-trivial production workload. Disk space is not the issue. Distributions do the crucial and painstaking work of backporting security fixes. This cannot be done when applications are shipped with huge blobs of dependencies, like with flatpack or containers, it's simply too much work for any organization to do that.