Yep. Crostini under ChromeOS operates more or less the same way. It's also why I personally am done with the homebrew approach.

I was using VMs to address the disaster that is the Windows Registry as a developer back in the early 2000s. Homebrew is such an amazing step backwards in that regard.

I have a feeling that Terminal.app is headed this direction on Mac OS, but Apple is taking their sweet time navigating the migration since everyone gets pissed off whenever they fix a security/reliability problem. Could you imagine the uproar if the next version of Mac OS worked the way ChromeOS does? (ps., there's nothing stopping you from running Firefox on ChromeOS, I've done it).

Everyone gets pissed off because the Apple way of fixing security "problems" is to take more control away from the owner of the system.

> I was using VMs to address the disaster that is the Windows Registry

What do you mean?

The general issue one runs into on Windows where you, say, install a bunch of dev tools and then, at some point, your registry gets corrupted and you find yourself needing to reinstall everything.

If you run your tools, and do your testing, inside of VMs, you can quickly "restart" from a known good state.

The Windows Registry is a lot like /etc in Unix-like environments. In either case, all that configuration can get co-mingled and corrupted and you have to start over.

VMs are a great way to solve that problem for developers.

Registry corruption since w2k is pretty much solved. It's a database with a WAL-style transaction log. If registry corruption is something that happens to you more than once, I'd check the storage since there's probably a lot more that's getting corrupted... Otherwise - keep full disk backups.

Chucking and restarting a VM is a lot faster than dealing with full disk backups.

Registry corruption isn’t just about transactional integrity. It’s also about whether or not something got misconfigured along the way and now you have to go figure it out. Or end up trying to uninstall and reinstall a bunch of stuff.

I’d rather just be able to start over from scratch.

All this work to treat our servers like cattle, but we insist on treating our clients like pets. Your local client should be just as replaceable as your servers.

It’s not so much corruption, it’s that every app uses it a little bit differently and half of them aren’t good at cleaning it up on uninstall. You can still get the system into a bad state where a rebuild (especially if you don’t have a lot of dependencies) is easier than trying to untangle whatever app or script or driver borked something.

I’ve experienced registry getting bloated and it is terrible for data restoration. I can’t think of any meaningful similarity between windows registry and Unix /etc. I’ve experienced orphaned config files but no other real issues. The orphaning is intentional usually because the config file has been changed from the default.

Yes, this is what’s so alluring about WSL, whereas with homebrew on my M1 setup I have an utter clusterf&$& of a paper trail across my desktop that is a real PITA to plausibly reverse course, modulo Time Machine backups.

I use a `brew bundle` to help manage this. Make a `Brewfile` listing homebrew installs, then `brew bundle cleanup` to delete everything that's not in that file. This way I can try something out and easily delete it (and the dependencies it installed). It also obviously makes it easy to setup a new machine.

This has been my MO with home brew as well. But it’s not perfect. Unix-style apps don’t always behave nicely when it comes to cleanup and it’s easy to get borked, not to mention the difficulties that the homebrew folks go through each time there’s a new release of Mac OS. I really think the writing is on the wall and we’d all be better off dumping homebrew and just using VMs.

You can use Homebrew and MacPorts concurrently. I will always choose the MacPorts version of a tool given the option and only fall back to a Homebrew version when absolutely have no other choice. It's frustrating to have to use two tools but I've found it easier to keep my dev environment clean this way.

Wait; do you mind sharing a bit more about how you do this? I somehow missed this reply, and appreciate the pointer

I haven't had to do anything fancy yet. I just install both and try to find the MacPorts equivalent first before using Homebrew.

For example, I use the MacPorts version of Python. If I need any Python dependencies I install them either via MacPorts or pip.

In fact, I only have two Homebrew packages installed: dockutil and mas. Both are tools I use as part of ansible scripts which don't have MacPorts equivalents. All the remaining Homebrew packages are all cask apps (Firefox, Chrome, Discord, Slack, etc.). Those don't have any dependencies that would cause any conflicts.

For comparison, I have 139 MacPorts packages installed. 2 Homebrew packages, and 21 Homebrew cask apps.

What happens when your windows system goes haywire(disk failure/os update gone wrong)? Good luck getting it work the same even if you have backups. One of the reasons i love NixOS is i can get it work exactly the same as it was before on completely new hardware.

I've moved my WSL instances. It's basically just a vhdx with some config