> Although, do modern OSes rely too much on the Internet, or does the modern development ecosystem? I'd say both. Operating systems should be developed with o

> Although, do modern OSes rely too much on the Internet, or does the modern development ecosystem? I'd say both. Operating systems should be developed with offline first in mind, instead of giving into the prevalence of downloading things from the Internet. For example, Debian has apt-cdrom which allows updating /etc/apt/sources.list and adding packages from DVDs or CDs. That is good, the next logical progression of which would be doing the same for any storage medium - flash memory, HDDs, SSDs etc., just a set of tools to easily create package mirrors on these storage devices and to read them from the OS to make airgapped environments even easier. Instead, as things currently stand, downloading a package with all of its dependencies is perhaps needlessly hard if you don't want a full mirror, but only need something like gcc with everything it depends on in one gcc-with-all-dependencies.deb file. And the situation isn't necessarily much better with the way how Flatpak and Snap packages want to handle updates, while there are definitely valid arguments to be made about automatically updating packages over the internet, as Debian unattended upgrades already does, relying on it too much makes software brittle. For example, just look at this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/541583 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/541583 It took Flatpak until 2020 to address this, i'm not even sure what the situation is with snap packages and using them in air gapped environments, since that's also only in beta: https://docs.ubuntu.com/snap-store-proxy/en/airgap https://docs.ubuntu.com/snap-store-proxy/en/airgap I apologize if the above sounds a bit like rambling, but the bottom line is that if developers truly cared about airgapped environments, then using and managing them would be as easy as the alternatives, not less so. Be it in regards to tools, to how packages are managed, or even just the day to day experience while using them. And that trend extends deeply both into the OS itself, as well as the software that's used by it (especially in cases of non-standard update mechanisms, like some browsers like to do), as it does with the development ecosystems nowadays. It's surprisingly how little pushback something like snap got, instead of the community delaying its utilization until all of the concerns have been addressed. I'm not saying that we shouldn't innovate in regards to package management, apt over apt-get showed that there definitely can be improvements in regards to usability, it's just that we as an industry should never be satisfied with using half baked solutions.