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Something I don't yet understand about flatpak et al: isn't using that for every app in the core OS experience going to chew through storage because shared libraries can't be shared across images? Or does the containerization solve that problem?

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Modern storage is at least hundreds of time bigger than when shared libraries were common to save space. Every single executable having its own copy of GNU C Library isn't a big deal.

But they have to be mapped into RAM, right? And if the OS can't unify those distinct images because they're in different paks, isn't my RAM now being eaten up by clone static data that I could instead be using for actual work?

Though from 2017, check out this blog post explaining Flatpak's architecture.

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2017/10/02/on-application-size...

I can't speak for the others, but Flatpak is a layered solution, so files are deduped and shared across the layers (runtimes, applications) that need them.

Ah, good point. That feels win-win then; package maintainers get a huge efficiency win by just synchronizing on their base packages but they're not locked to them so they can make things work without littering up the user's global library space with oddball versions of dependencies.

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