Have you actually tried to make a fully statically linked GUI app on Linux?

Just did it!

I had to add "-static" to LDFLAGS and "-lxcb -lXau -lXdmcp" to LDLIBS, for an increase in binary size from 1MB to 3MB. It's a plain X program, i guess if you use fancy toolkits it may be harder.

Try getting 3D rendering now. Your statically linked libc will fail to load the GPU driver and your app won't work :)

True. And that's why linus showing the finger to nvidia was an exhilarating relief to so many people. The gpu driver shenanigans are horrific to contour, but they are completely unnecessary on technical grounds. All the difficulties are purposefully introduced by the graphics card hardware companies. I'd say "fuck it" and do the rendering in the cpu only, which is almost always possible.

I agree, but hopefully it's clear that there's a major problem all these crazy solutions are trying to work around.

If anything more than plain X is fancy to you...