[josephg]

I’ve been meaning to check out Nix for awhile for this exact reason. I want the state of my operating system to be a simple state machine managed by a package manager. Right now the filesystem on Ubuntu and friends it feels like a horrible mess of random stuff. You end up in a different OS state if apt fails halfway through installing, or if you install an old package, configure it then upgrade it vs installing a new package. The classic “make install” just puts files wherever it wants. And then there’s the layered complexity of language-specific package managers - which are needed because apt isn’t up to task.

This is one big advantage of docker. Applications are actually portable and isolated. We need more of that in our Linux distributions.