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infests the user profile almost irrecoverably With 'profile' I assume you mean combination of registry and home directory, so Windows has the registry going ag

by stinos 5y ago

infests the user profile almost irrecoverably With 'profile' I assume you mean combination of registry and home directory, so Windows has the registry going against it but as far as the home directory is concerned it's the same thing everywhere. Aren't most OS plagued by that, and is it in some way also not logcial? Some software must store things. So if you want to install software for one user (like the ~/Library you mention) and have per-user configuration, and so on, all of that ends up in the user directory. And I don't think there's any OS which manages to go from a full install to a clean install and can clean up the home directory while doing so. Instead leaving a myriad of subdirectories of which it isn't immediately clear whether it's ok to just delete them or not.

whateveracct 5y ago
> And I don't think there's any OS which manages to go from a full install to a clean install and can clean up the home directory while doing so. NixOS ;)
- lokedhs 5y ago
  Only for applications that are well-behaved. Nixos doesn't enforce any of the isolation, which is something that disappointed me when I tried it the first time. If a program wants to mess up another program's private directory, they can do that without anything stopping it. I then realised that having actual isolation was never even a goal of the project, so I've never bothered to look at Nixos after that. The only project on Linux that provides a practical solution to this is Qubes OS. I use it, but there are limitations that prevents it from being used by a lot of people. The fact that applications don't have GPU support is a big one. One may suggest Flatpak as well, and it's a good solution when using properly packaged software, but if I want to do development and use various tools without necessarily trusting all of them, Qubes OS is really the only way I can do that.
r00fus 5y ago
I like the way macOS handles this - .app package files are just folders that the OS treats as an icon; you can introspect if needed and the app can store its preferences etc inside the app container so it’s even portable (for user, not to deploy but mainly backup). If the app needs access to folders it asks for it (even ~/downloads) otherwise it has nothing by default.

by stinos 5y ago

whateveracct 5y ago

> And I don't think there's any OS which manages to go from a full install to a clean install and can clean up the home directory while doing so. NixOS ;)

lokedhs 5y ago
Only for applications that are well-behaved. Nixos doesn't enforce any of the isolation, which is something that disappointed me when I tried it the first time. If a program wants to mess up another program's private directory, they can do that without anything stopping it. I then realised that having actual isolation was never even a goal of the project, so I've never bothered to look at Nixos after that. The only project on Linux that provides a practical solution to this is Qubes OS. I use it, but there are limitations that prevents it from being used by a lot of people. The fact that applications don't have GPU support is a big one. One may suggest Flatpak as well, and it's a good solution when using properly packaged software, but if I want to do development and use various tools without necessarily trusting all of them, Qubes OS is really the only way I can do that.

r00fus 5y ago

I like the way macOS handles this - .app package files are just folders that the OS treats as an icon; you can introspect if needed and the app can store its preferences etc inside the app container so it’s even portable (for user, not to deploy but mainly backup). If the app needs access to folders it asks for it (even ~/downloads) otherwise it has nothing by default.