Alpine feels a lot like a BSD to me, and I’m very happy with it.

But this bloatification is happening all over the place. Firefox is starting to have more and more dependency on flatpak’s daemons, even if you don’t use flatpak. These daemons are becoming the de facto standard for some interfaces too sadly. This also means that a lot of software is a lot less portable.

I'm just going to move to BSD entirely, I think.

I'm saddened to hear that FF has dependencies on flatpack daemons, but I'm not surprised by it. The direction Linux is going seems very clear to me, and I expect more of that sort of thing as time goes on.

Meh. There’s just too much technical debt all over the place. Not even BSDs suffice from the POV of what an OS can be. A new modern OS written today with lessons taken from the past would solve the inherent pains of all existing ones. My dream is to do that. Just a dream rn tho.

It's a quite powerful idea to run every package in its own container (sandbox).

However, it depends on the implementation and Snap just sucks.

(Note that the default Unix assumption is that no users can be trusted but all applications can be trusted, which is wrong imho. Containers provide a way out of this, but things get messy very fast.).

The sandbox is not going to protect users from spyware telemetries, bad security for the application itself, ads, and so on.

Yes, but right now my smartphone is more secure wrt apps than my desktop, which is odd.

No, you can use a security oriented distribution, plus sandbox the applications you use.

> The sandbox is not going to protect users from ... bad security for the application itself

Your other data, in other sandboxes, is protected though.

Sure, but that's far from enough.

This is almost the only working security approach: security by compartmentalization.

Not at all, it's not enough.

> It's a quite powerful idea to run every package in its own container (sandbox).

It is, but I also actively don't want every package to run in its own container. I'd rather containerize select applications that I choose.

Yes, this is one of many reasons why Snap sucks.

> the Linux world and I have diverged too much and I need to move on

I moved to Qubes OS and like it.

> The forced updating is particularly unacceptable.

Snaps allow you to hold updates indefinitely now: no forced updates any more. Use "snap refresh --hold <some snap name>". See https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--....

Oh, that's good news!

Oh wow I missed they finally gave in and fixed that. When did that happen?

I haven't run a desktop linux for years so this might be completely off, but what I got from it was there will two majors paths:

- you're a hardcore oriented distro, you assume most things will be built from source, follow all of your dependencies and maintain the glue for your distro. Gentoo/Slackware style。

- you value convenience and go the snaps/flatpack route.

And you can still go the convenience path while building some specific apps from source, but there will be a bigger gap to bridge and it won't make sense formost applications.

I get the shift, as we're already seeing it, even outside the cloud, I think it's still the best of both worlds. I compare that to how I'm running a natively compiled postgres version but a containerized mysql because it was too much of a pain to match all the dependencies.

But there really needs to be a third path, in between the two you cite. Most Linux distros have been that third path.