I'm not interested in getting into a big debate, so I probably won't respond to any replies to this, but I thought these claims needed a little more context.

I can definitely agree that the reception FatELF received was a big problem (though, on the glibc side, not unexpected. Ulrich Drepper is an infamous jerk who even rejected a patch to fix skewed distributions from strfry() because "Stop wasting people's time! Nobody cares about this crap." It's one of the reasons Debian switched to EGLIBC.) but Autopackage fails to get adoption because, architecturally, it's a messy hack, the developers have an arrogant "If we disagree, the world is wrong" attitude and, for better or for worse, many Linux developers care about both of those things.

(I'd link you to a flurry of blog posts going into more detail from as far back as 2005 but the domains are dead, they don't seem to have been saved by the Wayback machine and the only reason I still have access to some of them is that I save local copies of almost every page I read using the ScrapBook Firefox extension.)

Efforts do seem to be under way but God only knows whether this attempt will meet with more success than previous ones. (Here's hoping since this one actually has the major distro vendors participating.)

No argument. It's not as bad now that they finally gave in and implemented single-window mode (especially with some fine-tuning by someone who knows good UI design principles), but it could still use improvement and Synfig Studio (a Flash-like animation tool) still follows the horrendous mistakes made in GIMP's multi-window mode and actually does worse.

(Though, in GIMP's case, last I checked, part of the problem was that they still made the same mistake Firefox used to make. Long, heavy, slow release cycles with inefficient merging based on Subversion.)

Private DLLs are basically Windows's way of getting the benefits and downsides of statically-linked libraries without actually statically linking. The only advantage they have is that, like LD_LIBRARY_PATH hacks, users can swap in another version if the developer screws up and is too lazy/busy to release a newer version.

In fact, SDL2 just added support for overriding static linking so that ported games using static linking rather than just LD_LIBRARY_PATH hacks can still allow the user or distro packager to force a newer version of SDL on the game in order to apply fixes.

In essence, it's a trade-off between security and stability. Private DLLs put responsibility for updates on the application provider while fully shared libraries make it easy for the OS updates system to patch a security bug at the risk of breaking an application if the library or application aren't rigorous about maintaining and sticking to an agreed-upon stable ABI.

It's similar to the situation that has prompted Microsoft to take steps like requiring webcams use the Microsoft-provided USB Video Class driver if they want Windows Logo certification. The majority of remaining BSODs are caused by 3rd-party drivers that Microsoft can't fix because they don't have enough leverage to force them to update.

As Donnie Berkholz explains in On package management: Negating the downsides of bundling, there's no simple solution.

I'd be careful citing Ingo Molnar. He's burned enough credibility and made enough enemies over the years on other issues that a lot of people will just dismiss his arguments because he made them.