As someone who actually has run at-least-15-year-old binaries (though admittedly not x11 ones for my use case), I can strongly state the following advice: * do

As someone who actually has run at-least-15-year-old binaries (though admittedly not x11 ones for my use case), I can strongly state the following advice: * do not use static linking for libc, and probably not for other libraries either C-level ABI is not the only interface between parts of a program. There are also other things like e.g. well-known filepaths, and the format of those can change. A statically-linked program has no way to work across a break, whereas a dynamically-linked one (many important libraries have not broken SOVERSION in all that time) will know how to deal with the actual modern system layout. During my tests, all the statically-linked programs I tried from that era crashed immediately. All the dynamically-linked ones worked with no trouble.