I agree but in containers' defense they weren't supposed to be about security in the first place. In my understanding the main incentive for the huge push behind them was immutability and them being microservices-friendly technology.
They can be used also for development create isolated FHS environments with a simple text file describe the environment, again without containers.
That's one of the reason I consider them the future, you have:
- built-in infrastructure as code
- built-in immutable servers
- built-in orchestration/provisioning
All with human-readable, easy to manage, text files.
BTW NixOS, repology at hand, offer the most up to date and big package set, second only to Arch AUR... Fedora and Ubuntu are far behind. Not so "obscure" IMO...
NixOS includes packages for multiple Python versions, as well as a large fraction of PyPi multiplied by the number of Python versions on which they run, and Repology counts all of them despite these being basically the same package.
It's still a large package set even accounting for that, but it's not that large.
I can also add few Gnome Shell extensions, Emacs packages and Vim plugins etc. They may "count less" but when you build your system, for instance via homeManager they count.
Having switched off Ubuntu when Canonical decide to leave desktop (because yes abandon Unity7 means leave desktop, and adding 10+year support to latest LTS means the same) I found a far more up to date system with a bigger package selection than Ubuntu, plus all the advantage of a functional OS (replication, never-brake updates, major distro version included etc)...
I can't really measure accurately nor package coverage nor popularity but I found NixOS all but certainly not an obscure distro... For GuixSD I'm a bit less happy since while I like scheme vs nix, I like Emacs integration and Emacs related packages it really suffer from having too few devs. But not NixOS. NixOS IMO is production-ready and a good choice other RH/Ubuntu for server usage...
"Think Dockerfiles, but for bootable, immutable, stateless, graphical (or not) environments for your everyday usage"
It supports Arch/Debian/Ubuntu/VoidLinux.
> In my understanding the main incentive for the huge push behind them was immutability and them being microservices-friendly technology.
I'm not a container historian, but I believe this came later: when Docker and the like entered the scene with their ideas of immutability, LXC on Linux was already several years old, and BSD Jails / Solaris Zones probably a decade older still; and they were all quite mutable.
When I first came across them, I viewed them as very lightweight VMs, with (as you say) rather insufficient security, but still useful for experiments or to segregate services for ease of management.
"Think Dockerfiles, but for bootable, immutable, stateless, graphical (or not) environments for your everyday usage"
It supports Arch/Debian/Ubuntu/VoidLinux.