Debian packages.

[tgalati4]

You make some good points. And yes the memory footprint would increase because you are no longer sharing libraries. But again, how big would a statically-compiled Ubuntu be? How much more RAM would a base boot require? How much slower would it be?

[phrostbyte]

You make some good points. And yes the memory footprint would increase because you are no longer sharing libraries. But again, how big would a statically-compiled Ubuntu be? How much more RAM would a base boot require? How much slower would it be?

Well "how static"?

If you statically compile against GTK+ for every GTK+ app you'll probably have some absurd memory requirements. Do you really want to this? If so .... WHY? If a library is multiple megs it's a little much to statically compile this into an app.

It's worth noting that Arch/Fedora doesn't statically compile everything. Windows apps dynamically link to the Win32 API (largely implemented as shared libraries), otherwise every app might pull hundreds of megs of libraries

Arch bundles -dev into the package, which is mostly the header files for the lib (required for compilation). This is not the same thing as statically compiling everything. I mean, Arch is regularly respected for it's speed!

[tgalati4]

True. The header files aren't huge Yes, gtk has a large footprint. So there seems to be a tradeoff between package size, number of packages, and installed footprint size.

Look at dsl, tinycore, slitaz for how small a desktop linux can be.