"What do you mean when you say that the operating system is dynamically linked?"
By that I mean this: grab a debugger, attach to a random process you have running. Pause and look at the current stack: you'll notice that the code you're looking at resides in a so. And everything on the current call stack is all shared code, loads of it, sandwiched between the kernel at the bottom and a thin layer of hosting executable on top.
Here's another way to look at it:
http://paste.ofcode.org/diZdtuH8uPs2UBWHEvTYWh (try to ram all that code into gnome-panel itself and ship with next Ubuntu - see what users will tell you)
One more time: shared code is absolutely essential. Only "one-process-per-machine" datacenter approach can do without. That's why there is no Java on the desktop.
By that I mean this: grab a debugger, attach to a random process you have running. Pause and look at the current stack: you'll notice that the code you're looking at resides in a so. And everything on the current call stack is all shared code, loads of it, sandwiched between the kernel at the bottom and a thin layer of hosting executable on top.
Here's another way to look at it: http://paste.ofcode.org/diZdtuH8uPs2UBWHEvTYWh (try to ram all that code into gnome-panel itself and ship with next Ubuntu - see what users will tell you)
One more time: shared code is absolutely essential. Only "one-process-per-machine" datacenter approach can do without. That's why there is no Java on the desktop.