EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution
easyos.org
easyos.org
PuppyLinux was my first distro, it was great fun to be able to boot directly from a flash drive. IIRC persistence was implemented by just writing to a file which could be located anywhere, even on a Windows system. It was a great way to get familiar without committing.
Lot of Linux forums need to update their assumptions by about 20 years.
Persistence is optional here, you can either have it or not have it.
It also has a built-in tool to remaster the OS image, so you can update all the packages, install a few more, then run a Remaster and then you have a brand new USB bootable OS image with updated packages.
MX Linux also has the "Frugal Install" feature that lets you install the USB version of the operating system to your hard drive, but it will still act just like you booted from USB, with the system being rolled back if you don't manually persist the system.
https://pendrivelinux.com/ is still around I see
https://easyos.org/about/easyos-forum-amp-other-links.html
"Please note that EasyOS is not Puppy Linux. EasyOS forked from Quirky Linux in 2017 (and Quirky forked from Puppy in 2013), and is a major rethink, including core support for containers. Barry created Puppy Linux in 2003 and remained at the helm until 2013, before turning control over to the "Puppy Community".
Barry still scans the Puppy Forum, and there is a lot of "cross pollination" with EasyOS, in particular sharing of PET packages. However, Barry cannot provide help if you have any issues with installing or using Puppy. Nor is it appropriate to post such questions to the EasyOS section of the forum."
I discovered so many great apps through Puppy, including Geany, ROX Filer and gFTP.
This is the website the rest of the web should strive to be!
It reminds me a bit of https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
Different point of view - this site is poorly designed, hard to navigate, hard to read.
Just because it doesn't use any JavaScript doesn't automatically mean it's a good website.
So true.
All other things being equivalent, it can make the difference though, if only for the user.
I find the blue-on-white text difficult to read. Though, surprisingly, it's a bit easier to read on mobile for me.
The line height is too short to read easily.
I have a lot of trouble with the "How and why EasyOS is different" page. Especially on mobile where it's nearly unreadable for me.
if u were trying to check out a fast, small live linux distro without destroying ur windows partition, u had to run into puppy.
maybe u used linux in institutions where there was a sysadmin to do things for u.
Slightly, I recall.
I'm not old, my beard just came out gray while I was waiting for all those USB sticks to boot since USB1 ;)
Kauler is brilliant.
I couldn't have gotten as far as fast once I found Puppy, because quite simply the fewer megabytes the size of the distribution, the faster the bootup.
And there was nothing else as small that booted all the regular Linux ways (including from FAT32 using Syslinux), and was worth being a user after you were booted :)
As for ISOs, more perfect images would be great.
For one thing they're wonderful for consistency, starting with the fundamental structure of partitioning & formatting which is copied bitwise identically from the master to the target as it overwrites the whole target. Simultaneously with all the user-oriented files within the file system, ideally it's like a forensic copy.
Also sometimes the boot files are finicky, or take a while to get right, and once it really works as robustly as possible on the master device, it would be perfect if every target device needed no attention whatsoever even though booting is very important to pay attention to. Not only will the exact user boot files be there on the target's resulting filesystem, the hidden boot records will too whether they are part of the filesystem or not. And further, the boot files in the filesystem will be at the exact same sector locations as the master. So will all the other files & folders. You can't get much more identical than that.
With bitwise copying, even the unused space within the filesystem will be copied verbatim from the master to the target, whether it contains zeros or vestiges of previously deleted data. And the filesystem is not even actually completely there until the bitwise image has finished copying to the target.
Just like an ISO was when you actually were burning to CDs, maybe at an earlier time than you were writing any USB drives.
And images are usually way faster than copying the exact same files by using an OS to copy them to a freshly formatted filesystem the regular filewise way. Whether copy & paste or CLI.[0]
I went through images backwards and forwards, have gotten a lot of reliable use out of it.
And you really can end up with equivalent performance either way.
When you do end up with the same performance that is :\
Turns out identical is not what you want with USB sticks.
more background
No matter of any "hybrid" approaches (even before UEFI) trying to make an ISO that could be directly copied to USB, modified ISO's are just not very good at copying to USB sticks and having them functionally boot like an ISO is supposed to do. Even when all the files and folders on the target end up fully accessible, performant, and error-free. It can be a frustrating thing.
Image files have a problem too, the hardware that the master image was saved from may be so dissimilar to the target media, that performance of that particular target, perhaps when interacting with other supposedly-compatible hardware such as motherboards, will be abysmal compared to the master device, and unpredictable across various motherboards.
Not such a big deal with HDDs and barely noticeable with SSDs but can really bring otherwise-satisfying USB devices to their knees. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. All targets within the same SKU as the master but some have slightly different controllers, firmware, or memory chips? Ruh-roh. Differernt SKUs on the USBs? I wouldn't be that confident any more.
Depends on how you handle the image file.
As long as you treat it like a standard ISO and mount it before copying filewise to a previously-prepared filesystem on a bootable USB stick, you should be fine :\
More or less what Rufus does automagically, he is brilliant too.
It does kind of defeat the purpose of having an image that's supposed to be copied bitwise directly to a target though.
Using dd or Etcher is so much quicker but then you're just playing the odds.
Decades ago for USB booting I used to think images were ideal.
But I was wrong.
Completely wrong.
Wrong about standards and I'm a standardization guy. How much more embarrassing can you get?
If it's supposed to be Linux (no matter whether DVDs or USBs become obsolete) ISOs boot using Isolinux, HDDs SSDs & USBs boot equivalently using Syslinux, and you can do it over a network using Pxelinux. These have all been very stable references for very long.
ISO files are an even older standard than Isolinux, which makes it even more fundamental so it's always been golden. Now I realize that. Everything that continues to trace back to this standard has a remaining chance to perform at least as reliably over the long term as ISO's have already performed so far. The continuity among Linux distributions using ISOs so far will be unmatched for decades to come no matter what happens. And ISOs were made for direct copying bitwise to their target media. Too bad it's just not right at all for very many USB sticks, so instead you have to first mount the ISO and copy the files & folders to an already-bootable previously-prepared USB drive. I'm not going to be regularly copying ISOs bitwise to optical disk devices any more (if I can avoid it), so in the future (starting quite a while ago) I'm not likely to use an ISO for what it was originally intended to do, if at all. Doesn't seem like anybody's going to be using ISOs to burn directly bitwise to media any more, which is the only reason ISO became the Linux standard for distribution to begin with, so why are ISOs needed going forward at all?
Too late, ISO (as the name implies) is now more valuable as a standard than it ever was for burning discs.
So now the further you go into the 21st century you really need the ISO's to keep working, more so than ever ! Even if nobody's burning discs. You can't make this up :]
And after exhaustively confirming that images are far less reliable for copying bitwise to USB sticks compared to ISOs when using optical, it leaves us back where we started without a worthwhile image file type than can always be overwritten to a USB whole-hog and have it boot. But at least you can still do it with DVD's using ISOs if you really have to, no different than ever.
Probably because an IMG (just like an ISO) is a filetype entirely focused on only one thing, writing it to a target device to make a perfect clone of the bitwise data pattern from one drive to another. Or to copy back to the same drive during a restoration event. Can't mistake that, it's either a true copy or not. Even if IMG is way older than ISO, it worked for floppies no different than it does today. The motherboard still just responds to whatever bit pattern it finds on the boot device, regardless of MBR, UEFI, EXTx, NTFS etc. I didn't think too much about it either, but there's a lot more electronics in between the motherboard and the bits residing on the storage medium for a USB than there was for a floppy. And a lot more "chance" for variation. Too bad IMG is not a standard filetype. But as long as it can be overwritten to the same device it came from and result in a perfect restoration from backup, it's job is accomplished with flying colors, and it almost never fails.
So if you're worried about the age of the filetype, IMG is so much more elderly than ISO that it was almost repressed bad enough to be forgotten (since not everybody wanted you to make perfect clones), which is probably why nobody came along to extend it for anything beyond everyday floppy use. Floppies worked just fine and were interchangeable without a detailed functional standard IMG filetype at all. But without a standard, IMG is just a filetype in name only which is why it's still the right file extension to use when you are going to be overwriting a whole drive of any kind with it later. That's exactly what it's for, and nothing else. And after a lengthy famine, there are now more brilliant tools that mount and handle wildly diverse IMG files simply because they are known to be a complete drive image. So all an IMG needs to do is behave like a drive image (as long as a particular IMG does that, no standard needed), it can be mounted and people are so much more familiar with VMs which helps a lot for those who've never used a floppy yet.
Barry is brilliant but others are too.
IMG works about as good on a whole hard drive as it did on a floppy, lots of USB's too when you're getting lucky. Hard drives have so much more in common with each other but they're not perfect either. But it's not ever been expected to work every time when the master and the target are less-than-identical hardware.
Remember at one time almost every IMG file was targeted to deploy on floppy media, approximately 1.44mb in size, containing 2880 sectors. Worked fine without a filetype standard then, and anything other than 2880 sectors would trigger the question "exactly what hardware am I supposed to write this file to?"
The thing about standards is, lots of people struggle if they aspire to meet a standard. You may or may not quite make it. But nobody says just because you conform, that you have to stop right there.
People generate millions by exceeding a standard when others are not. They can match others' work but others can not match theirs.
GRUB has got to be able to work too, it's under constant maintenance and has way more modern features.
And this Limine bootloader looks really promising. It has nowhere to go but up.
They've all got to work on every kind of Linux at least, with any other OS's being icing on the cake !
Less than that could be the result of a bug, maybe even a defect.
[0] Which filewise sometimes amount to a mere fraction of the GB actually transferred when done imagewise.
I encountered it when netbooks were super popular and I wanted an OS that actually ran decently with some storage to spare.
Ain't nothin like the real thing baby . . .
What we really need is a better way to segregate sensitive user applications from non-sensitive ones. Like Firefox containers but closer to an application level and something that is easier for the average user to manage than the likes of SELinux.
Maybe that’s the point of the containers in EasyOS?
There is no rule that everything should have a giant green download button promising some kind of instant satisfaction.
Is there a reason atomic upgrades so popular now? Not that it's a bad thing. (Edit: The advantages of atomic upgrades are obvious. I'm asking what changed to make it practical.)
- Pushes the use of containers for apps, /usr is read-only (mostly). in most cases Flatpak and Podman/Docker/Distrobox/Toolbox
- Makes reproducible builds, your /usr is the base fedora image + whatever you have explicitly configured to add, the latter part makes it very easy to customise the base OS and undo changes (which are tracked), or share changes with others.
- Updates are atomic, you pull the power cord during an update? no bueno will just boot the old deployment. Additionally, because the system is always in a known and immutable state, updates should always work without any kind of dependency/package issue, your swapping one /usr for another.
- Makes malware harder as /usr is read only and you can use composefs to make sure content isn't changed, not really that secure though given any malware can just infect the initramfs
Flatpak/Containers can prevent it but permissions are up to the developer/packager.
Screen with 20 checkboxes is never going to make simple GUI. I can imagine “configuring most common cases should be possible with simple GUIs” but *everything* is going to be challenging.
The latter implies only common needs covered in the GUI.
Edit: the complete source paragraph does go on to list services. Which confirms they’re talking about every service rather than every imaginable operation.
Most likely if you are an expert you already have one liner ready to configure "Expert" stuff and you don't want to click checkboxes.
Like yourself, I find the CLI more intuitive than a GUI (so much so, I even wrote my own $SHELL and terminal emulator), but it's difficult to argue for or against their specific approach when the subject is based on speculation.
If you're able to share a screenshot of their "Expert" tab to show how it's not particularly easy to use, then that would go a lot further to demonstrate your point.
The situation isn't identical, but broadly speaking the goal of having a GUI for everything which is still good and powerful feels to me like it should be possible, albeit not easy!
There are people that believe that everything should or can be easy.
It is just painful to watch those people.
Yes you can build some software that will make FFT useful and you don’t even know you use FFT in an application.
But telling if an image is important for you to not compress it lossless way or 1000 of your images is or is not - well you have to sit down and make decisions and go one by one or make some rules that won’t be perfect.
If you run in RAM and flush periodically, you're probably gonna lose data at some point, what we actually need is software that doesn't rewrite a 6MB every minute for no reason, but still saves user data when it should.
I'm not a fan of nonstandard hierarchies, lack of systemd, or running as root, but I do like how they focus on being batteries included and very GUI focused.
Not that root is actually a security issue, because everything important is under your user most likely, but it makes it easier to make mistakes that you then can't fix because the system is broken.
Even on windows though there are some “administrator” level things that need escalated privileges to do.
[0] Why the ISO format has to die
0. https://easyos.org/about/why-the-iso-format-has-to-die.html
With you 100% on that.
And fully appreciate Kauler's opinion on ISOs too.
I like this EasyOS project but I would say the intended users are a lot more of a moving target compared to the regular Pups.
And that's good since there are fewer forces that confine the ultimate direction in which it may go.
The one critical thing with running as root in my mind is clobbering some storage in /dev.
Elsewhere in this thread the benefits are described , and im really curious if Linux could get a proper SAS/SAK working (your root password would only ever be entered into your trusted system login UI)
Got any links to docs on how Android works in this respect, please?
Good luck guys
This comes off as fairly ignorant. Virtual machines? Ventoy? There are lots of tools which can flash an ISO to a thumb drive or similar. ISO files are far more useful than just burning them to optical media.
Modern Linux ISOs are a sort of hacked hybrid ISO/IMG, where keeping support for burning to CDs (the ISO part) has some trade offs (such as workarounds needed for persistence storage, multiple partitions).
I know nothing about Ventoy, though.
A good example is VirtualBox Guest Additions that packs several drivers for multiple OSs in a single ISO and leverages the autorun mechanism to simplify automation for end users.
Uh what!? About every single Linux distro has .iso files available.
And it typically makes way more sense to dump the .iso to a USB stick than to an optical media because it speeds up the installation big times. That's the case for Ubuntu for example.
And an example as to why optical media are kinda falling into irrelevancy: some distro like Ubuntu ship an ISO that doesn't even fit on a DVD anymore. It is an ISO meant to be dumped to a USB stick, not an optical media.
Now of course the downsize is that there is something very nice when you burn an .iso to a write-once optical media: once you've verified that the disk's cryptographic checksum is correct, you know the disk's content won't change so there's no need to recheck it (at least not for security purposes).
With USB stick that's not the case.
> I know nothing about Ventoy, though.
...
That doesn't really mean much. The point is that there's practically only disadvantages to ISOs and using image files instead would make more sense nowadays.
Except burning to "legacy" optical media.
That can't be altered once burnt. If I could write it on a stone tablet I would (more durable).
Also the author comes off as arrogant/rude, calling people who don't like ISO as "older members". Maybe I'm "old" no longer being a twenty something, but I'm also not (yet) "old".
I guess it depends on how sensible different levels of reliability are for your particular application.
On the other hand, I can download an ISO for almost any popular Linux distro and easily install it without reading a single word of documentation, even if I've never used that distro before.
Just interactively setup a virtual machine and at the screen that provide you the choice of your disk size, you just select the option to use an existing disk and select it.
Sounds to me like you're one who is doing the VM right, as effectively as anybody.
I wonder what people think about this,
When I was first doing VMs, I would have the image in a file and it had to be stored somewhere.
All I would have in the file, would be an OS and maybe a couple apps installed.
Really only takes up a few GB of drive space as long as I don't try to store any massive or valuable data within the image.
I wouldn't want that kind of data in my images anyway.
And I had plenty of drive space so I didn't need any compression or space-saving measures to be applied for storing images.
In this case the working image takes up the exact same space on some drive either way.
Might as well let the image stay installed on its own partition so I could boot to it the bare metal way when I wanted to, or alternatively use it as a VM when re-booted to a powerful enough host OS which has been previously installed to a different partition.
Now in the terabyte world I've got more spare drive space than ever, and with GPT drive layout I can have as many partitions as I want.
Definitely learning as I go.
The main reason you can easily copy installation images to USB sticks and other devices is that they are actually “hybrid” images with a bag of tricks helping them to also work like a disk drive, and boot that way. There are two boot loaders which handle different modes (and a third one in UEFI boot partition, though accessing it is firmware's problem), and the kernel knows that it can be started in various ways, and has to look for the root filesystem in multiple places. Ventoy and company make use of the fact that everything is ready, and the only thing left for them to do is adding the menu item with proper path and kernel boot options.
So you can run Linux from USB stick, you can run it from there, but use intermediate boot loader (say, Plop chain-loaded by main system to bypass slow USB access in old BIOS through its drivers, and massively decrease boot times), you can run it from extra partition added to your disk, you can run it from image file, you can run it from memory, and so on. ISO is just a convenient legacy distribution format that does not help with any of that. And, as mentioned, there is no “boot process” with UEFI, you simply copy a bunch of files to the USB flash drive, firmware sees that one of them looks like a boot loader, then it is started, and can do anything it wants.
I mean, the author had gone into depth about this.
Absorbed it at the time and followed up with experimentation ever since.
Edit: experimentation was underway long before this was published.
there's also a Part 2:
https://bkhome.org/news/202112/why-iso-was-retired-part-2.ht...
>I have whittled away at the use-cases in favour of using the iso file,
Very well done, and I would rather not have to use ISO's myself since the only remaining thing they are perfect for is distribution, where it doesn't look like they will be beat for a very long time.
I would rather not touch ISOs any other time, but I'm going to have to maintain the skill anyway.
There's definitely nothing better for Windows than ISOs and Windows is huge with very sophisticated imaging built-in.
Kauler just happens to make an even more sophisticated IMG than most would do, for this distribution I can handle it with no drawbacks compared to a standard ISO file, and way better than a funky "hybrid" ISO.
I love how you can’t get any sense out of them.
“So, you can see that software Y is almost unmaintainable in practice due to no maintainers wanting to work on ancient codebases?”
Yes.
“And you won’t maintain them?”
Yes.
“And you will not pay someone to maintain them for you?”
Yes.
“But you will staunchly fight the suitable FOSS alternative?”
Yes.
“Even if it means a constant relative decline in performance and options, not to mention evermore terrible workarounds?”
Yes.
Makes my head spin.
The first iPhone, running iOS v1, was kinda shit. It's easy to look at what the iPhone is today and laugh at Ballmer, but I don't think what he said was wrong at the time he said it.
Now just grab Linux Mint or whatever. Use a "real" distro with a community. Install it if you like it.
What's "easy" here, exactly?
N.B. It has nothing to do with popularity (number of users)
[0] https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=ranking
In comparison in Windows C:/ has program files, or documents in /user1, which make much more sense (to me at least).
I mean, speaking as someone working on windows nearly every day, I hate GUI/its GUI. Every single "gui" app is some trash that I wish there were just some cmd line for (and I've been doing this sort of thing for over 10 years, its not lack of familiarity).
There are things I want/find lacking in cmd line, to be sure, but they're generally nothing that a better cli interface/script/wiki can't solve better.
I wanted to see and just googled how to create a new account:
On windows, from my knowledge - open control panel and search for account.
Linux - I don't know, so I googled it for Fedora (which I have installed). What I got was [0] - which... talks about UIDs, GIDs, ACLs, UPGs, Shadow Passwords... It's great to have options but I'd love a "Just add an account" option rather than needing the user to understand what's going on. Oh, and most of the explanations are only for the command line even though a GUI exists.
For comparison, Windows has [1] which is much more simple.
It's been death by a thousand command lines for me on Linux so far unfortunately. Would someone more determined have succeeded? Likely. But if my update fails because of space issues in a drive which needs me to do 'a', and 'a' has an error needing me to do 'b', and 'b' needs me to understand 2000 words to only use 5 words finally in my command... it's exhausting unfortunately. And not to brag or boast but I'm not a tech noob. I'm the go-to tech guy in most rooms. I've mucked around with custom android ROMs and root access on my iPad (trollstore/fileza) and edited registry files and other root-level files without bricking anything. And yes I can use chatgpt to repartition my drive, but c'mon, I'm not that dumb to blindly plug in what it says. I'm going to research the individual commands first and take an hour to realize it was right all along.
Sorry if this became too ranty, I'm just pissed because I want to like Linux. But it's really, really hard.
0 - https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/system-ad... 1 - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/manage-user-acco...
Personal discovery can be one of the main catalysts for easy migration.
Google is not your friend.
That ship has sailed.
Nothing "personal", but knowing nothing about Linux, if you walked up to an already booted desktop of something like Linux Mint, there is a particular series of incantations you would need to make if you wanted to see something about the user accounts.
I can only imagine what different people think about this.
You would have to click the start button, then a popup will occur which may or may not be surprising.
There would be a button labeled "Administration" in a field which is visible on most size monitors.
You would have to click that then scroll to the very bottom of the resulting icon list where under careful observation you would find another button, labeled "Users and Groups".
You would have to accurately click that before arriving at the exact little control panel which then pops up, where you would finally be able to create another account.
Fortunately, no command line is needed, this is bad enough.
Once you get accustomed to this type of thing you could always start abbreviating it something like;
Start > Administration > Users and Groups.
It might be a lot more advanced than Windows in some ways but not others, but eventually it's possible to get accustomed to it.
Without giving up Windows at all if you don't want to ;)
You've still definitely got a legitimate comment about discovery compared to Windows that has not been completely overcome though.
That issue isn't solved by UIs, though. Things are constantly moving/changing colors/disappearing. That's why so many UI "redesigns" get so much hate, breaking user's mental models, etc.
> Would someone more determined have succeeded?
Nah, its not about determination. Command codes take memorization, sure. But that's mostly solved by search. Combine with a good library of scripts, and you don't need determination, just a little natural curiosity.
In case you missed out from the library metaphor, what do you do when you have some information that you want to access repeatedly? Use a bookmark.
You can't even do remotely the same thing with a UI, its all inaccessible nonsense-crap that takes eons to learn and then you still have to figure out the "hard" commands anyways (because invariably there's a bug or some feature it can't do).
Installing 20 guis or recompiling several programs from source constantly is a terrible way to operate. Commands, on the other hand, can be chained, they can be scripted. There's nothing approaching that level of usability in "gui" land. They're a waste of time in comparison.
> That issue isn't solved by UIs, though. Things are constantly moving/changing colors/disappearing. That's why so many UI "redesigns" get so much hate, breaking user's mental models, etc.
I agree. What is ideal for most people is a system to explain what are the choices available. In case of command lines often help commands I believe are meant for this.
…However, GUIs (like the settings app in Windows, Android, iOS and even Linux IIRC) are much better at explicitly showing the hierarchy. For example on android, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are both in the section of wireless radios, but different from the section of a factory reset. Adding a Bluetooth devices requires navigating via submenus.
While that may sound inefficient (and it is when you’re doing the same thing 10 times a day), it’s excellent for breaking down a hundred settings into easily understandable ones. Listing -help often causes this issue - important arguments or options or commands are mixed with ones that are hardly used and not related.
And the thing is, all this is entirely a design thing. One could make a friendly CLI with submenus as options, with warnings that go beyond the basic “do as I say”, like the “are you sure you want to delete this user” thing.
I will still mention that using red colors and orange exclamations and Skeuomorphic icons helps - a picture speaks a thousand words, and the battery emoji takes much less space than 7 letters - but unfortunately in my experience CLIs are about as informative for discovery as the Sahara. I can open any GUI settings app and learn all that is possible in an hour, while understanding relations and context. Display scaling is related to font size, and wallpapers to personalisation.
It’s definitely possible to have a nicer CLI where such relations are obvious/clear. But I haven’t found anything yet, unfortunately.
(Edit: I realised I didn’t respond to your full comment, it’s almost midnight here so I’ll try and reply tomorrow)
As per my previous comment, I suggest you more fully leverage the concepts of bookmarks, and (script) libraries.
You can have some very simple "graphical" aids on top - your console must live in a window somewhere, and you probably want to be able to tile them. You probably want to be able to quickly reach for a couple (common) digital knobs.
However, just like you haven't found a "nicer CLI", finding this "nicer GUI" is difficult and rare experience.
That's where I am with Diskpart.exe.
So many more features, options, and capabilities than the Disk Management GUI.
Very familiar with Diskpart on CMD line for decades, but there are still things I wish I could do with it.
So I have to use the GUI version sometimes anyway for certain tasks the CLI can not accomplish :/
You're probably thinking "well it will have said it was going to uninstall gnome - they just needed to read it!" and that is exactly why Linux will never really be ready for casual users.
[1]: https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.htm...
if you're always careful to run as a non-privileged user, the most that could happen is that a browser vulnerability allows arbitrary execution of code as your user, allowing deletion, encryption, exfiltration of your personal data. so you're boned anyway.
In the traditional Linux desktop model a vulnerability may allow to run something as the user. It can change your bashrc, your application menu as well as your launchers, your browser extensions and settings. You may already have a user writable directory in your PATH so it can replace things even on a lower level.
FINALLY. One step closer to a more modern mobile-like untrusted-by-default setup.
It has gone on way too long that any standard installed program can spy on every other program/all your data on the system.
Now in this case where the user is root it might work out as an interesting balance in practise, I'm not sure.
For the group of people who want to use an app but not a computer, I think something closer to the iOS model is probably better.
For my work computer I want something more traditional but for my personal computer, my phone, and my game console, I want something more appliance-like.
Both of these ways of doing things currently exist (and there are others) and I would guess that will continue to be the case for a long time.
Not disagreeing, but, the threat model of the creator of Puppy Linux may be different than yours.
If my user account is compromised, the attacker can ruin my credit and reputation, end all my friendships, drain my bank account, and sell my entire life history to an eager 3rd party.
If my root account is compromised, the attacker can do all of those things as well as add a printer, or delete a file that I can download freely from the Internet. I don't really care about that additional attack surface.
Often times we have:
(implementation for programmer, UX for user) = (easy, complicated) | (hard, simple)