The Theological Problem Behind Firefox in Ubuntu 22.04

I'm not sure why we have to call it theology, unless we're on an edgy atheist kick, because we've already got cargo culting which seems to mean the same thing.

The problem of all this container business everyone complains about is, as far as I can tell, quite thoroughly solved by Android API levels, Python(Until they started making breaking changes constantly), the browser, Excel Spreadsheet, and Windows.

On these other platforms you don't need a "container", you just need a statically linked binary.

You don't need to orchestrate 599 microservices because you just do a monolith, because unless you're doing a massively scalable thing it's probably enough.

You don't get bizzare crappy conflicts and incompatibilities because the OS specifies exactly what APIs there are. Everything is either inside the app, or completely fixed and not a swappable part.

Even swappable drivers have a fixed API that the OS defines, rather than being daemons that define their own interface and might not be compatible.

There's no systemd vs sysvinit, there's no init system at all, there's no display server, there's no GPIO and GPS daemon, there's just the OS, and it's specifically meant to not need and tinkering with or customizing.

You don't have a bunch of ifdefs in your code anywhere to say "If I'm on Wayland do this otherwise do that", because it's all built into the OS.

If the OS wants to upgrade something, they make sure the old and the new thing can coexist, and they just keep the old one around for a decade till they're pretty sure everyone is done with it.

As much of the complexity as possible stays centralized and reusable. Your OS might be 16GB, but it's 16GB of heavily reused code where bugs are found fast, instead of millions of unique containers, no fragmentation, no X program that can't run if Y already is.

If you need security, you still don't need a container, you just need SELinux like permissions, or browser sandboxing.

First, why do people do this?

> MacOS makes your life miserable but you find it cool because marketing makes you believe it.

Well, your offhand condescension sure convinced me that I’d want to spend time on your community! Or, you know, even bother continuing to read the remainder.

I didn’t bother. I did, however, look at other stuff the author has written and was delighted by the French for “enshittification” in another post’s title:

> La merdification

"faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"

2022