There was no native userland. You picked an userland and it ran in a container along with /etc and other mounts. The idea being that the OS itself should be sep

There was no native userland. You picked an userland and it ran in a container along with /etc and other mounts. The idea being that the OS itself should be separate, developed as a whole and immutable like an appliance OS like FreeNAS, XenServer or VMware ESXi. For ops lifecycle supportability (installs, upgrades, downgrades, etc.), keeping the OS immutable has a lot of advantages in the "system entropy" department because users and admins can't corrupt the OS itself as easily, can replace it more easily and it's far easier for itself to run HIDS against. If it I were developing an immutable OS, there would be a hidden volume containing signed squashfs volumes and updates would be delta overlays that could be merged when the older base volume is no longer needed. Another interesting Linux distro that uses virtualization rather merely containers to isolate system components for security is Qubes OS. Really, I think any new Linux distros should: 1. be developed as an immutable whole 2. run most system and user-added services in containers 3. have package collections like nix or habitat that don't have dependency hells 4. make service and configuration management easy 5. not reinvent the wheel without specific goals and niche/s to occupy that are better than what came before 6. do damn good jobs of smoothing package rough edges, upstreaming patches and rapidly releasing security fixes (including ksplice/kpatch) 7. least surprise everywhere 8. think carefully about whether to go systemd or s6/runit/daemontools 9. manage logs better, preferably without local text files, streamed across a distributed system that scales like flume or kafka