[sleavey]

Thanks for the info. I like that Canonical are trying to solve the problems with package managers, but it's a shame we can't focus on making APT and friends more capable of the positive parts of app stores without bundling things into binaries akin to Windows executables. Allow multiple versions of libraries able to be installed, provide path translation (so systems that store binaries in /opt and others in /usr can still work from the same .deb file) and make sure repositories are more frequently updated. This might require Ubuntu to move to a rolling release, at least for some of their products (maybe they could keep releasing LTS versions every two years but have a rolling release for everything else). Sandboxing is arguably nothing to do with the package manager or app store - it's the kernel's problem. And bundling dependencies together is bad for security - critical vulnerabilities (recent example being in SSH) would not be able to be patched with one update, leaving unmaintained code that bundled a vulnerable dependency permanently flawed.

I think I'll wait for this most recent example of the trend to make everything into an app to blow over...