Well, I suppose bundling an entire distro is one way to go about it...

Posted Jun 15, 2016 10:13 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Well, I suppose bundling an entire distro is one way to go about it... by pizza
Parent article: Ubuntu’s snap apps are coming to distros everywhere (Ars Technica)

whereas an equivalent snap is 1016MB.

I wonder, the whole approach sounds similar to linking the application statically, except that a completely statically linked app would gain performance benefits (just read the image into core and run, no runtime linking or indirect jumping around needed).

But I guess modern development style (using explicit loading of .so:s for plugins) and tools make statical linking infeasible, except in the simple cases.