> Honestly that’s incredible. Is there anything close to it in the Linux world? Yeah, this is similar in spirit to what Flatpak and Snap do. The latter even us

> Honestly that’s incredible. Is there anything close to it in the Linux world? Yeah, this is similar in spirit to what Flatpak and Snap do. The latter even uses SquashFS images it mounts for every package. I have a feeling, though, that this is more similar to Distri¹, where the package manager is a bit more traditional. That is to say, packages are fine-grained (not packaging large runtimes into single chunks, like Flatpak and Snap) and there's not as much special tooling as Flatpak has for redirecting inputs and outputs, sandboxing, etc. Distri also eliminates all hooks and triggers from packages, leading to super fast installs, which is pretty cool. > Or I guess, I’m not an expert, that’s what NixOS is trying to solve? From the article, three key features highlighted are: > - Immutable system directories > - Rollback to previous states > - User-managed packages separated from system packages And, going by those criteria: yes. NixOS and GuixSD are two Linux-based operating systems which meet all three criteria today. One key difference is that Nix and Guix don't require namespacing at the filesystem, since they install everything to those wacky store prefixes with the leading hashes. Put another way: /boot/system on Haiku is a mountpoint, but /run/booted-system on NixOS is just a symlink, even though both serve the same function². But spiritually I'd say the basic idea (avoid dependency hell through lightweight package isolation) is similar and so are the results, at least in terms of capabilities. PS: If you're interested in another example, RedoxOS' package manager also has a very similar design to Haiku's and Distri's, IIRC. — 1: https://distr1.org/ https://distr1.org/ 2: Because NixOS allows you to switch to a new system without booting it (i.e., it lets you upgrade without rebooting), it actually has two symlinks here: booted-system and current-system. The current-system symlink rotates as soon as you switch configurations, but booted-system gets set only on a new boot.