Would be cool to get a bit of a "why this matters" intro on repos like this. I clicked through the details, but left wondering if I have any potential use for this. Can I compile this onto a USB stick and use it as a throw-away boot Linux for maintenance tasks? Can I cross-compile this for embedded devices? What is the statically-linked advantage here? Not trying to minimize the effort, I would actually love to see more such things, but felt a bit left out as I couldn't figure out why exactly it exists.

As someone who uses linux casually, I often experience pain when I download a program, try to run it, and it fails because some dependency is not installed or is not the right version. So you try to figure out how to install it and it in turn needs a couple of things.

All of this works fine if whatever package manager your distro uses has the program you want, but the package managers don't have evertying!

So I'd love an ecosystem where things tend to be statically linked unless there is a good reason not to.

> So I'd love an ecosystem where things tend to be statically linked unless there is a good reason not to.

Well, every time there is a bug fix in one of your dependencies you/your distribution would have to recompile everything that depends on it. Which will use quite some resources.

So to actually use this you would have to reinstall (nearly) all programs once a week or so (no matter if source or binary distribution). While that is quite possible with modern internet connections, I am not sure if it solves all the problems you might think it solves. After all, even nowadays application authors could provide static packages, but many don't do it.

After using quite a few distributions over the years, I like Arch Linux best at the moment, as the combination of binary distribution, with frequent updates, and the source based AUR, with the very large amount of packages, suits my needs very good.

> every time there is a bug fix in one of your dependencies you/your distribution would have to recompile everything that depends on it

Back in the dark ages, some mainframe operating systems like MVS normally stored executables as object files, and would link the program every time you executed it.

Has the on-disk space savings and updateable libraries of dynamic linking, without most of the complexity. I believe the original motivation was to allow an executable to run at an arbitrary address on systems without virtual memory though.

I would be surprised if there was not a way to take a dynamic executable, "add in" all the required libraries, and return a fat static executable

If you know of such a utility I'd like to see it, because I've looked and never found it. The closest I've seen are things like AppImage.