[zbowling]

Nah. Your objections are rooted in the very limited definition of what an OS is and what a user application model is that fits it. There is no reason why each process/app can't be sandboxed. In fact, it should be for security (we did it in fuchsia). It's actually the way things work with apps from the app store on MacOS in a lot of ways where you can't escape your jail except through what is explicitly entitled.

General purpose just means that it's generally useful for a wide range of applications. Android is that. Hell, you can find Android running small appliance server infrastructure and powering IoT devices. Even in 2024, iOS/iPadOS is general purpose at this point, and they have VERY different application models from legacy app models you find on Windows and Linux. You wouldn't not call NixOS a general-purpose OS, and it's like flatpak for literally every process down to things like bash, grep, and vim.

Snaps are fine. Aversion is only from how it was introduced to people in Ubuntu, but conceptionally, is great. cgroups wrapping user processes to box them is not only good for security but also for stability and solving dependency versioning issues. It's brilliant. It's similar to what we did in Fuchsia at Google (we took it to another level because we had no legacy to deal with).

And sure, maybe I have bad judgment on some things. I contributed a ton to GNOME in the early 2000s both code and ideas that were horrible in hindsight, but I'm not still stuck in an outmoded mental model for thinking about my user environment.