GoboLinux

This is a neat idea - and not without precedent. Installing each package into it's own directory, and maintaining symlinks into that directory structure, was an approach explored for large system installations in the 90s and 00s. NIST depot, Xheir, CMU, and Nix all did this in varying ways. The advantage of this approach was that packages could be installed once on an NFS, scoped by version/configuration, and mounted into the filesystem of every work station on a campus. The…

Wow, this model addresses a lot of the issues I have with different Linux distributions. Mainly, finding where the heck it installed that program in the maze of file/folder locations. Sometimes it's etc, opt, var/lib, bin, usr/bin, apps... Gwahhhhh! Then, you go to modify the configuration, and it turns out that the configuration file is being copied and generated from a different location. It's endless misdirection which changes in each distribution based on the package manager. I think I may…

For people -- admittedly, like me -- who have a strong knee-jerk reaction to GoboLinux's design the twenty year old "I am not clueless"¹ document contains a fair amount of interesting background and reasoning on the concepts. I don't think I've overcome the reaction entirely, but it isn't so strong anymore ;) ¹ https://gobolinux.org/doc/articles/clueless.html

Coming from Windows a year or so ago, the Linux filesystem has been probably the most confusing thing about the switch (I've read about the logic behind /var and /bin and /usr several times but it was not intuitive to me and didn't stick). I generally have no idea where my config files are stored and can barely find where programs keep their data. And then I download some software that doesn't install itself and I have to figure out…