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Comment by Erratic6576 | Hacker News Reader

I wish every OS user logged in their isolated VM of the OS. This way, Adobe could install all their bloatware and take control of their user and I could keep ownership of my Apple’s computer

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What's sad is that processes are already virtual machines, they just need to have a better permissions system. What's really sad is that for the most part those better permissions systems have been built (namespaces/cgroups on linux, gatekeeper on Mac OS) but nobody figured out how to expose that to end users before the business people figured out that there were trillions of dollars available if you charged rent to centrally manage it.

We were so close. Sigh.

Is this not essentially what docker did with cgroups? It’s incredibly tricky securing containers, I’m not at all confident process only sandboxes would be adequate.

There's a big difference between securing containers, and using them to prevent Adobe from polluting they entire system. Containers are an excellent way to provide lower guarantees of security (though still more than is there currently), with higher usability. Microvms also fit into the model very cleanly and could be used transparently when higher security was required.

The fact that VMs are necessary has shown how much OSes have failed. That we need to take an OS and package it into multiple VMs to get any real isolation is a problem that OSes should solve for.

> The fact that VMs are necessary has shown how much OSes have failed.

The fact that VMs exist at all shows how much OSes have succeeded.

Docker makes it really hard to do anything with cgroups. Unless you mean letting Docker manage everything about them, in which case you can configure nothing.

Systemd did the cgroups thing right. Apart from the v1/v2 thing, but if you can use only v2 then you do not need to think about it.

Essentially shipping an entire OS with every app looks horribly inefficient to me. Especially if the only thing you need is sandboxing.

Containers would be a more appropriate solution, and even containers would be somewhat overkill. Simply using UNIX-style permissions and an application-specific UID could do. I think it is how it is done in Android.

Isn't that roughly what Qubes OS provides?

Qubes does allow creating a VM for just about any program or service. But, in my experience, it suffers from latency. So, while fine for web browsing, it wasn't too keen on playing videos. YMMV of course, but Adobe products are already hogs without the emu layer.

I daily drive Qubes and will never go back to a normie system again if I can help it!!

Does it support macOS VMs?

> I could keep ownership of my Apple’s computer

That's a funny slip...

Pun intended

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