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It's really not weird at all, IMHO. If you look at ChromeOS, it's actually relatively mainstream. Most of us need a locked down desktop environment more than

It's really not weird at all, IMHO. If you look at ChromeOS, it's actually relatively mainstream. Most of us need a locked down desktop environment more than we realize. The UNIX/POSIX shell environment works really well for our specific kind of work (writing software), but it's full of security holes and gotchas. A lot of people talk about Apple as wanting to "own" everything, but the trend in securing consumer OS environments is clearly trending in this direction. Starting with research examples like Qubes, and all the mainstream security efforts in Windows, and ChromeOS. Working with a VM that you can torch and rebuild is ultimately the best of both worlds. What would be really cool is a Mac OS app for managing Vagrant... Basically a competitor for Docker Desktop for Mac that used VMs instead of Docker.

circularfoyers 5y ago
Fedora Silverblue is potentially where the future of the Linux desktop might end up. It improves on security significantly, where the system is read only, similar to macOS, and all user programs are sandboxed within flatpaks (migrated from the preexisting RPMs of these programs).
- jcastro 5y ago
  Have you been able to get nix working in silverblue? The read-only fs makes making a `/nix` not very straightforward.
  - jamesgeck0 5y ago
    You’ll probably want to install it in a Toolbox [1] container. This is the recommended way to set up development tools; you’ll generally want as little as possible layered on the OSTree file system. 1. https://github.com/containers/toolbox https://github.com/containers/toolbox
- jamesgeck0 5y ago
  openSUSE MicroOS Desktop is another distribution exploring this space. It’s a neat idea, but the SUSE folks are still working out a lot of quirks (the firewall had to be disabled in recent builds, for example). How mature is Silverblue? Can it be used as a daily driver with minimal fuss?
- vondur 5y ago
  Yes, I agree. It's kind of a pain to work with at the moment, but some more improvements it Silverblue is cool. Getting everyone to agree on FlatPaks may be an issue.
- kaba0 5y ago
  The issue is flatpaks. They want to be a sandbox as well as a package management solution at the same time, while being good at neither of them. The nix model would be so much better for the latter.
- bfrog 5y ago
  flatpak/snap have serious downsides and nix does a much better job of package management. The sandbox aspect is interesting but in practice it’s so far shown to break things in my experience
heavyset_go 5y ago
> A lot of people talk about Apple as wanting to "own" everything, but the trend in securing consumer OS environments is clearly trending in this direction. Starting with research examples like Qubes, and all the mainstream security efforts in Windows, and ChromeOS. This is because Google and Microsoft want to own everything, as well. It's not a coincidence that Apple, Google and Microsoft's security implementations enshrine each of them as ultimate gatekeeper and single source of truth for security on their respective operating systems. It is interesting that you bring up Qubes OS, because its security model doesn't depend on Invisible Things Lab, the Qubes developer[1], deciding what can or can't run on Qubes OS. In fact, if a security model that depended on a company like Red Hat authorizing what can or can't run on Linux, it would be rightly criticized as Red Hat trying to "own" everything instead of developing a secure system at the OS level. Yet Apple, Google and Microsoft are doing just that. [1] https://invisiblethingslab.com/ https://invisiblethingslab.com/
- numbsafari 5y ago
  I think we are really conflating "app store distribution" and "the POSIX userland isn't workable in a modern security environment for end-users". POSIX apps run as the user, when they really need to be run with their own identity. Most often we should use the identity of the "developer". Do I want Firefox to have access to my Contacts? My Photos? Do I want Facebook to have that access? To all of them, or just ones that I select? Should my disk utility have the ability to send data over the network? My IDE? My IDE plugins? This has nothing to do with "stores", and everything to do with the security model and the UI needed to make it work. e.g., when I run `grep -e "Something" -r ~/src`, I assume grep is going to read all of the files in ~/src. But in the basic POSIX environment it can access anything I can (including, say, ~/.ssh) and open up any old socket it wants and send data wherever it chooses. Have you read every line of code of every package you've installed? Rather than relying on 'trust', 2021 requires that we actually have some security model that doesn't rely on trust, but explicit permissions and grants, and workable UI for defining that. Wouldn't it be nice if bash arranged a read-only capability granted to the grep process for all files under ~/src based on the above command, and if the grep executable itself had no inherent permissions at all?
jbenner-radham 5y ago
You might be interested in: https://www.vagrantmanager.com/ https://www.vagrantmanager.com/
- numbsafari 5y ago
  I'm aware of it. Hasn't been updated in a long time, and you need to otherwise install vagrant and a VM manager separately (fortunately, it doesn't ironically tell you how to do so via homebrew...) I think a first-class vagrant app for Mac OS would (a) be available in the App Store for simplified VPP deployments (b) install vagrant and (c) either come with a lightweight VMM over Hypervisor.framework and/or work with other active VMMs like Fusion, Parallels or even Docker Desktop. Vagrant was born of the CLI, but I think in 2021 it needs to embrace its role as a bridge between the GUI and CLI. Just my opinion, though...
- bradfeehan 5y ago
  the grandparent comment of this one is Mitchell Hashimoto, who made Vagrant, and is sharing their current setup..
unicornfinder 5y ago
What you've described is precisely why I love WSL - you can nuke and rebuild your Linux setup easily. It's fantastic honestly.
- numbsafari 5y ago
  Yep. Crostini under ChromeOS operates more or less the same way. It's also why I personally am done with the homebrew approach. I was using VMs to address the disaster that is the Windows Registry as a developer back in the early 2000s. Homebrew is such an amazing step backwards in that regard. I have a feeling that Terminal.app is headed this direction on Mac OS, but Apple is taking their sweet time navigating the migration since everyone gets pissed off whenever they fix a security/reliability problem. Could you imagine the uproar if the next version of Mac OS worked the way ChromeOS does? (ps., there's nothing stopping you from running Firefox on ChromeOS, I've done it).
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    Everyone gets pissed off because the Apple way of fixing security "problems" is to take more control away from the owner of the system.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    > I was using VMs to address the disaster that is the Windows Registry What do you mean?
    - numbsafari 5y ago
      The general issue one runs into on Windows where you, say, install a bunch of dev tools and then, at some point, your registry gets corrupted and you find yourself needing to reinstall everything. If you run your tools, and do your testing, inside of VMs, you can quickly "restart" from a known good state. The Windows Registry is a lot like /etc in Unix-like environments. In either case, all that configuration can get co-mingled and corrupted and you have to start over. VMs are a great way to solve that problem for developers.

circularfoyers 5y ago

Fedora Silverblue is potentially where the future of the Linux desktop might end up. It improves on security significantly, where the system is read only, similar to macOS, and all user programs are sandboxed within flatpaks (migrated from the preexisting RPMs of these programs).

jcastro 5y ago
Have you been able to get nix working in silverblue? The read-only fs makes making a `/nix` not very straightforward.
- jamesgeck0 5y ago
  You’ll probably want to install it in a Toolbox [1] container. This is the recommended way to set up development tools; you’ll generally want as little as possible layered on the OSTree file system. 1. https://github.com/containers/toolbox https://github.com/containers/toolbox
jamesgeck0 5y ago
openSUSE MicroOS Desktop is another distribution exploring this space. It’s a neat idea, but the SUSE folks are still working out a lot of quirks (the firewall had to be disabled in recent builds, for example). How mature is Silverblue? Can it be used as a daily driver with minimal fuss?
vondur 5y ago
Yes, I agree. It's kind of a pain to work with at the moment, but some more improvements it Silverblue is cool. Getting everyone to agree on FlatPaks may be an issue.
kaba0 5y ago
The issue is flatpaks. They want to be a sandbox as well as a package management solution at the same time, while being good at neither of them. The nix model would be so much better for the latter.
bfrog 5y ago
flatpak/snap have serious downsides and nix does a much better job of package management. The sandbox aspect is interesting but in practice it’s so far shown to break things in my experience

heavyset_go 5y ago

> A lot of people talk about Apple as wanting to "own" everything, but the trend in securing consumer OS environments is clearly trending in this direction. Starting with research examples like Qubes, and all the mainstream security efforts in Windows, and ChromeOS. This is because Google and Microsoft want to own everything, as well. It's not a coincidence that Apple, Google and Microsoft's security implementations enshrine each of them as ultimate gatekeeper and single source of truth for security on their respective operating systems. It is interesting that you bring up Qubes OS, because its security model doesn't depend on Invisible Things Lab, the Qubes developer[1], deciding what can or can't run on Qubes OS. In fact, if a security model that depended on a company like Red Hat authorizing what can or can't run on Linux, it would be rightly criticized as Red Hat trying to "own" everything instead of developing a secure system at the OS level. Yet Apple, Google and Microsoft are doing just that. [1] https://invisiblethingslab.com/ https://invisiblethingslab.com/

numbsafari 5y ago
I think we are really conflating "app store distribution" and "the POSIX userland isn't workable in a modern security environment for end-users". POSIX apps run as the user, when they really need to be run with their own identity. Most often we should use the identity of the "developer". Do I want Firefox to have access to my Contacts? My Photos? Do I want Facebook to have that access? To all of them, or just ones that I select? Should my disk utility have the ability to send data over the network? My IDE? My IDE plugins? This has nothing to do with "stores", and everything to do with the security model and the UI needed to make it work. e.g., when I run `grep -e "Something" -r ~/src`, I assume grep is going to read all of the files in ~/src. But in the basic POSIX environment it can access anything I can (including, say, ~/.ssh) and open up any old socket it wants and send data wherever it chooses. Have you read every line of code of every package you've installed? Rather than relying on 'trust', 2021 requires that we actually have some security model that doesn't rely on trust, but explicit permissions and grants, and workable UI for defining that. Wouldn't it be nice if bash arranged a read-only capability granted to the grep process for all files under ~/src based on the above command, and if the grep executable itself had no inherent permissions at all?

jbenner-radham 5y ago

You might be interested in: https://www.vagrantmanager.com/ https://www.vagrantmanager.com/

numbsafari 5y ago
I'm aware of it. Hasn't been updated in a long time, and you need to otherwise install vagrant and a VM manager separately (fortunately, it doesn't ironically tell you how to do so via homebrew...) I think a first-class vagrant app for Mac OS would (a) be available in the App Store for simplified VPP deployments (b) install vagrant and (c) either come with a lightweight VMM over Hypervisor.framework and/or work with other active VMMs like Fusion, Parallels or even Docker Desktop. Vagrant was born of the CLI, but I think in 2021 it needs to embrace its role as a bridge between the GUI and CLI. Just my opinion, though...
bradfeehan 5y ago
the grandparent comment of this one is Mitchell Hashimoto, who made Vagrant, and is sharing their current setup..

unicornfinder 5y ago

What you've described is precisely why I love WSL - you can nuke and rebuild your Linux setup easily. It's fantastic honestly.

numbsafari 5y ago
Yep. Crostini under ChromeOS operates more or less the same way. It's also why I personally am done with the homebrew approach. I was using VMs to address the disaster that is the Windows Registry as a developer back in the early 2000s. Homebrew is such an amazing step backwards in that regard. I have a feeling that Terminal.app is headed this direction on Mac OS, but Apple is taking their sweet time navigating the migration since everyone gets pissed off whenever they fix a security/reliability problem. Could you imagine the uproar if the next version of Mac OS worked the way ChromeOS does? (ps., there's nothing stopping you from running Firefox on ChromeOS, I've done it).
- Karunamon 5y ago
  Everyone gets pissed off because the Apple way of fixing security "problems" is to take more control away from the owner of the system.
- viraptor 5y ago
  > I was using VMs to address the disaster that is the Windows Registry What do you mean?
  - numbsafari 5y ago
    The general issue one runs into on Windows where you, say, install a bunch of dev tools and then, at some point, your registry gets corrupted and you find yourself needing to reinstall everything. If you run your tools, and do your testing, inside of VMs, you can quickly "restart" from a known good state. The Windows Registry is a lot like /etc in Unix-like environments. In either case, all that configuration can get co-mingled and corrupted and you have to start over. VMs are a great way to solve that problem for developers.