[karatestomp]

> Unix (and hence Linux) was designed to make efficient use of these limited resources by installing popular software system-wide with shared dynamically-linked libraries because that was the only way to even _fit_ a few hundred users on one system. As a sysadmin, I get cold sweats thinking about what would have happened if every user wanted their own personal copy of Emacs on such a system.

I think this is largely beside the point, and not because concerns about resource use are outdated. Linux already has the concept of user groups. Just make packages installable per-group or per-user. There, issue almost entirely mitigated. The default case for single-user systems could even be group-install, since it'd look basically the same anyway—it's multiuser systems where true per-user package management might make sense, but isolation from basic system software management makes sense in either case.

> If you're looking for a Linux distro that behaves more like Windows and Mac, you're in luck because Ubuntu is hurtling themselves in that direction as quickly as they can by making snaps compulsory on every desktop install.

I'm no old-timer (yet) but my first couple computers had actually-floppy floppy disks, so I remember resource constraints well and remain conscious of them to an above-average level, I think. Ubuntu these days is buggy bloatware with little extra going for it in exchange, and has been for a long time. For ~3-4 years early on they were doing a good job of curating a decent Linux desktop experience with reasonable defaults (as in "Epiphany? LOL no, our desktop metapackage will install Firefox, TYVM") but those days are long past. Snaps are so plainly godawful that it's got to be internal politics that let them get this far, and keeping them alive—but such a thing is only a tempting development target because software management on Linux is all mixed up with keeping the system bootable and fundamental hardware features working to a basic level, which is the thing I'm not happy with.