Who uses those for desktop applications? Even if I need a VM for something coding-related, it’s almost too much of a pain to set up because AFAIK there still aren’t many quick provisioning tools for e.g. VMWare. And I can guarantee that 99.9% of users have never even heard of Docker.
Linux users have platforms like Flatpak that sandbox applications to known directories, and have multiple "app store"-like implementations with colorful buttons to make the process look unintimidating and non-threatening.
Another option is to simply use distro packages. Users of good distros who use distro packages have software that's vetted built from source independently, and compatible with the rest of the system.
> AFAIK there still aren’t many quick provisioning tools for e.g. VMWare
I use VirtualBox. I boot just about any Linux distribution's live Desktop image without any hard drive attached (so, ramdisk only). Then curl a script to download and install any dependencies. After a few minutes I'm off to the races.
I use it too. You have to have that curl script (not a default user experience), manually mount the ISO (and have it downloaded), and then you risk losing all of your application state if the machine crashes since there is no storage. Seems like a pretty terrible experience. Why don't we have something like Vagrant where you can quickly provision a VM from the command line following a template?
> You have to have that curl script (not a default user experience), manually mount the ISO (and have it downloaded)
What? I made my own script. I don't need to mount any ISO.
> you risk losing all of your application state if the machine crashes since there is no storage
That's a feature given that apps these days insist on being in a browser with cloud storage, there's no loss here.
> Why don't we have something like Vagrant where you can quickly provision a VM from the command line following a template?
That'd be great, actually. I'd do it if I knew Vagrant better. The biggest blocker for me using Vagrant is that it uses Ruby. Give me Vagrant in something like Bash instead. Or like docker-compose.