[Tloewald]

Funny, this occurred to me more than ten years ago (as a result of seeing knoppix, actually) but it still hasn't come to pass. Given the increasing importance of mobile, i doubt many users will sacrifice battery life or laptop comfort for the dubious benefit of having their applications partitioned into VMs.

Using VMs for apps does make sense for some pro apps, especially those with idiotic system requirements and/or copy protection. And obviously for testing.

[bane]

I can see it being spun pretty hard as an anti-virus initiative at some point, or a "guarantee you software investment into the future" kind of thing.

Nobody (consumers) really care that it makes it easier for app developers or most of the other benefits, but consumers can be scared into all kinds of weirdness.

Bonus for PC makers, it would give a huge boost to kick off the upgrade cycle again for home PCs. More cores, more RAM, more disk space needed for all these dozens of VMs (each with their own multi-GB OS and software install).

Heck, I know of at least half a dozen people who do a variant of this right now in order to run a single Windows only application on their Macs.

[clarry]

If this gets popular, I can see them stripping the OS and other cruft down so that the application almost runs on bare (virtual) metal. A complete desktop OS with user software and drivers for all the unused hardware sounds unlikely.

[arghnoname]

This is basically what OSv is. It's stripped down virtualization environment meant to only run a single application on bare (virtual) metal.

[Tloewald]

Proof of concept viruses are already out for this architecture, so it just becomes a bigger management headache.