Thanks for the explanation. But I guess that the Windows style is
becoming increasingly common in the Linux world as well,
You mean "side by side", right?
I agree. Some developers took another approach and compiled all their code statically.
AFAIK "Go" language does it by default, so all libraries are simply "packed" to the one big binary file
that depends on kernel ABI only.
with the rise
of Docker, Flatpak, Snap, etc. (as another poster in this thread
mentioned). And these are not just for those who don't understand the
value of using the repositories: lately I've been encountering quite a
few popular and useful applications (e.g., Nextcloud (server), Jitsi,
Caddy, Traefik) that for whatever reason (upstream doesn't maintain a
sufficiently stable version, etc.) are not packaged for Debian, and
going the Docker / Flatpak / Snap route is quite tempting.
Yes, this reason is very common: I need "Python 3.9", but stable Debian doesn't have it.
So, I have to use Docker.
There is even a Linux distro that doesn't have anything except bare core OS: "Core OS"