> How would this work with apps that create things that a user would expect to persist, like downloads (kept after uninstalling a browser) or office documents (

> How would this work with apps that create things that a user would expect to persist, like downloads (kept after uninstalling a browser) or office documents (kept after uninstalling the office suite), or media production apps, IDEs, etc.? I can't see how it would. Making the uninstall remove all the files created at runtime is the wrong solution to a real problem, which is better solved by forcing all packages to be self-contained and making their installation an idempotent operation. If we're able to do this, there's not much to clean up afterwards, and we ensure there's no privileged malware left (such as Zoom's one) as both the package install scripts and runtime would be able to run unprivileged. I use NixOS, an OS built on Nix, a functional package manager that does this, and being able to set my system to a known state without going through the steps of formatting and reinstalling is really nice.