[kitsunesoba]

I think Silverblue's approach is a good start, but for desktop usage I'd like to see userland "environment" things like DEs get their own layer with a similar treatment as the root OS, so you could e.g. roll back GNOME or KDE independent of the rest of the system if you so desire. This would also make it very difficult to inadvertently put the system in an unusable state through things like dependency conflicts — if your DE fails to start it can simply fall back and start the last known good version.

The lines for what counts as "environment" are fuzzy which might pose a challenge, but the fix for that could be as simple as offering sane defaults and letting the user decide what is/isn't included.

[pxc]

> I'd like to see userland "environment" things like DEs get their own layer with a similar treatment as the root OS, so you could e.g. roll back GNOME or KDE independent of the rest of the system if you so desire. This would also make it very difficult to inadvertently put the system in an unusable state through things like dependency conflicts — if your DE fails to start it can simply fall back and start the last known good version.

Yes! I've been thinking about the same thing as an accessibility feature for disabled users, as well. I recently learned that I'm going blind, and so I've been thinking about how this kind of mechanism could be used to ensure that a system always has, e.g., a working screen reader and fullscreen magnification software. I'd like to add something like this to NixOS, which is my favorite distro and daily driver.

[klooney]

Have you played with distrobox at all?

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/r...