Many people here seem to think this change will allow for people to package their Linux apps to be portable across distros/distro releases. If this is true then this a great!

On Debian-based distros it kind of sucks when the version of a package is only available in a newer release so the only way to get it is either compile it yourself or upgrade your system.

I remember trying to hack around this once by downloading dependencies from a newer release and helping the program locate them but I think I ran into a issue with the linker version being hardcoded or something and gave up.

>Many people here seem to think this change will allow for people to package their Linux apps to be portable across distros/distro releases.

There is no need to make binaries portable across the distros, because Linux is a source based OS. You can always just compile anything for your own system, just don't forget to submit the buildscript to the repo.