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Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

> If they consider desktop Linux supported during development, providing a couple statically linked deb and rpm files is no big deal.

There's also the issue of dependencies on other non-default packages. Do you ask the user to install another repository? Do you host your own repository and distribute the dependent packages in it along with yours? (Note this is much more complex than building and hosting a single .deb/.rpm)

Not to mention "desktop Linux" is not a thing. Supporting Fedora, Ubuntu and opensuse, for example, are all distinct efforts with only minimal overlap in terms of effort (think not just initial dev, but ongoing maintenance and testing).

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As far as I know, Snap, AppImage and the rest are all statically linked.

You can have static linked Deb's and RPM's as well. That's what most of the vendor-provided deb's and rpm's do.

Technically, they usually aren't "statically" linked as such.

They usually use dynamic linking, but then ship those dynamically linked libraries in the package.

This has the advantage that the user can still replace the libraries if they want (e.g. for games this is sometimes useful to replace the sdl build with one with more options enabled), and I've heard rumblings that the support for static linking on linux isn't all that great.

Your knowledge is incorrect. Snaps don't have to be statically linked. They use a mount namespace with a predictable set of libraries that are maintained and receive security updates. In addition the application can bring additional libraries but those are on the application developer to maintain (or delegate to a hosted service like build.snapcraft.io to rebuild on security updates).

Sure, you can do static linking, you just don't have to and this is not how snaps work.

Thank you for correcting me. Appreciate it.

Although my point somehow still stands:

Vendors could've statically linked their apps for a long time and provided debs and rpms relatively easily for a long time.

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