FOSDEM 2017 - Resurrecting dinosaurs, what can possibly go wrong?

My presentation at FOSDEM 2017 talking about containerised applications (Flatpak, Snappy, AppImage) and how maybe they're promising to not only solve a bunch of problems, but bring back a bunch from the dead.
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Originally uploaded by FOSDEM at video.fosdem.or...

[@hxka]

"Slutpak and Flappy" - Richard Brown, 2017

[@vpxc]

Richard, are you familiar with the Nix/Guix approach? Nix and Guix are multi-distribution (Nix works on OS X and BSD, so it's multi-operating system as well). It shares many virtues with the Snappy/AppImage/Flatpak/Docker approach, but crucially lacks the vice of static linking. It allows highly reproducible builds and an entirely pure dependency tree (up to the level of the operating system choice), but it automatically deduplicates dependencies at the package level.
Moreover, since Nix/Guix is a package manager for a full Linux distribution with a substantial number of real users (NixOS for Nix and GuixSD for Guix), every Nix package has a maintainer, can include unit tests, etc. In fact, Nix and Guix already use a distribution mechanism called ‘channels’ which only supplies new packages which are verified to build correctly. (We could certainly use additional testing along the lines of the openSUSE project's OpenQA infrastructure.) Nix and Guix packages are offered in stable distributions as well as rolling releases, too. So all of the distribution infrastructure you crave is in place already!
Have you considered that approach before? What do you think of it?