Shared libraries also mean that you can patch a large number of programs, simply by updating the shared library. If you have a large number of statically linke

Shared libraries also mean that you can patch a large number of programs, simply by updating the shared library. If you have a large number of statically linked program, you need to recompile all of them, which means that you need to know exactly which applications uses the affected library, when a bug shows up, and recompile all those applications and redeploy them. Without knowing, I imagine that's also partly why Debian wants to have all programs use dependencies installed via APT, it makes it easier to keep track of which other packages needs to be rebuilt. Personally I'm a huge fan of having applications ship with all their dependencies, like statically compile Go, Rust or Java jar/war/ear files or even containers. It's super easy to deploy, but you do need to be constantly rebuilding and keeping track of dependencies, and I'm not seeing a ton of people doing that. For Python programs we use apt as a package manager for libraries, because that removed the burden of keeping on top of security issues, to some extend. We do sometimes need to back-port or build our own packages, but try to push those upstream whenever possible.