I wonder when the pendulum will swing back and people will stop this insanity. I can already picture the buzzwords people will invent to describe "apps running on the OS itself".

On the other hand it's no insanity to run millions of lines of code in a computer, connected to the internet and hopefully sharing all the projects you need to work with and dependencies you need to make them work, with full access to your filesystem, usually requiring administrator rights to be installed or even used.

This would all be needless if there was an OS that allowed you to switch to another "env" wiping the RAM in the process (like, storing a snapshot of it for when you switch back), with guaranteed isolation at the filesystem level (perhaps able to still read-only link into common libs), able to install things without touching other "envs". If you're working in any webdev related environment, that is itself the definition of insanity.

It's like buying a hammer from the carpenter at the end of the road and giving access to all your house to him in the process, including your wife. Everything becomes a nail.

Maybe I'm just a simplistic person, but classical Linux distributions make this problem non-existing for 99% of what goes on in my world.

Their role is precisely to orchestrate the cooperation and interdepndency of those millions of lines of code. I don't understand why people have started turning those distros into glorified delivery vehicles for containers.

Simplistic is actually good - but I don't think that any (?) of the available current OSes is able to contain a program that can run once as administrator right? If I'm not recalling it incorrectly, BSD jails, linux cgroups, user filesystem permission, docker, vm's - and that's at the surface.

"A bare-OS application" sounds almost as cool as "bare-metal".

That would require people to clean up. Sometimes I squint at the installation requirements and then head over to hub.docker.com. I think it will get worse (i.e. more layers on top) before it gets better.

Yeah when you see "install this docker" OR "follow this 10,000 line install and compile guide" and then have to explain to your boss what you've been up to today.

Yeah, containers or VM's up the count indeed, but still. 2 Parallels (test version for m1) VMs running server ubuntu, 1 with 2 ssh connections, for X and tunnelling, running emacs into my desktop, running a web server with repl and environment, other running Postgresql. Safari with 8 tabs open, 4 terminal windows, Xquartz, tells me the biggest memory footprint is the vm with emacs/server/repl, at 3.9GB followed by the other VM at 2.8GB, but the overall used mem says 6GB used(?).

From the tabs Gmail was pointing to +1GB - a browser email client consuming +1/3 of the memory a VM running an OS plus a database.

I sometimes have another VM, another 2 ssh conns, more tabs open including youtube and never noticed any slow/sluggish behaviour.

I also feel like running VMs is wasteful, but it seems we are not able to create OSes with proper native tools for isolation.

Why would containers do anything to memory requirements? I guess you can't share libraries, but otherwise I don't see why memory use should be any different running the same process in a container or not.

> The problem is containers.

Even this makes little sense unless your containers are really poorly sized. I used to run a mini Kubernetes cluster on my desktop with 6 nodes. Some of them running big Java projects, Postgres, Elastisearch, and Ruby. And I still had enough memory to run Rubymine or IntelliJ along with Slack and whatever other local stuff I needed.