It was actually the straw that broke the camel's back for me as an Arch user. This was around the time Arch Linux was going through lots of breaking changes.

Now we have docker. Probably not solved until we write all our applications as some sort of crazy monad to minimize maintenance pain. I think docker is a meaningful step toward that.

Desktop Linux seems to be finally moving towards self-contained formats like AppImage and Flatpak. They are clearly not oriented towards server apps, but who knows.

Not really, the KISS nature of arch means that stuff that could be automated isn't because reasons, while systemd gets a special pass.

The glibc update from around the same time was a much worse update update. I think that one did break every Arch install I had at that time.

Note though that Gobolinux is largely constructed from shell scripts.

Also, since this comparison was made Gobolinux replace /System/Links with /system/Index. The latter is more like the classic FHS, and came about because of various issues during software compiles (iirc).

Oh, one potentially interesting tidbit about Gobolinux history is that it apparently started out as one guy's way to manage compiles stored in his user directory on a university server. Sadly since the move to /System/Index the tool for bootstrapping such an environment, Rootless, has been nonfunctional.

but if another program needs a older or newer version you can install that version in parallel without it disturbing the rest.

And I don't see either what prevents one to distribute an application as standalone by stuffing all the libs needed in the application directory.

Nix (and NixOS) does most of the same things, and then some, achieving more of the potential benefits. If you're going to break compatibility anyway, you might as well do it in a big way.

A 2x improvement isn't enough to be worth the cost. 10x might be.

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