You can't get rid of the distro-oriented shared library system, it exists as long as you are building on top of an operating system. To that end, when you say "we depend on operating system minimum version X.Y.Z" that now becomes another dependency you have to ship at some point if you're running the production machines. Containers are popular because they actually solve that exact problem. If there was some other comparison you were making I'd be interested to hear it, but AFAIK containers can only help here so it's not clear what else you were comparing to.