<i>&quot;Does Flatpak address this problem at all?&quot;</i><p>Yes, it seems to. As I understand it, there&#x27;s the concept of a runtime, which is kinda like an OS installation (but it&#x27;s an immutable image type thing that gets distributed identically to everyone who wants that runtime), which packages can be built against, meaning the application package only needs to include its own specific dependencies that aren&#x27;t part of the runtime. So, similar to how one might build for Fedora 24 now, one could build for a Fedora runtime, and any user who had that runtime wouldn&#x27;t need that image to be downloaded...they would already have it. So, if you only installed packages provided by your OS vendor, the size of things wouldn&#x27;t change much.<p>Where things begin to look different is that any Flatpak can be installed on any system that has Flatpak. So, don&#x27;t have a runtime that an app you want is built against? No problem, this&#x27;ll grab it and set it up, transparent to the user. And, next time you want another package built against that runtime, it won&#x27;t need to add it. This is like being able to install anything from Debian repos on CentOS, or vice versa; it&#x27;s also like being able to install from Debian stable, unstable, and testing all willy-nilly without fear of it breaking other packages.<p>At least, that&#x27;s how I understand it...but, that&#x27;ll be many years coming. This is such a fundamental shift in how we think about packages that it&#x27;s unlikely to catch on quickly. But, I&#x27;m a package manager nerd, and I can&#x27;t believe I didn&#x27;t realize this was underway; I would have started following it earlier. I love this idea.