100% agree, I only say it for users who don’t want to get into system administration and just want a desktop OS that’ll work out of the box with minimal issues. Same thing goes for other points you touch on:
- An average user might not know what drivers and codecs are or that they need to install them manually, which itself is something they’d rather not have to do.
- An average user wouldn’t know or want to learn what all the different packaging formats are, what containers are, and how to use them, especially if it’s done in a CLI (like Distrobox).
I came across this a while back and hadn’t tried it myself yet. I’m excited for what this can mean for the future, but based on this review it looks like it still requires some technical knowledge to understand what’s going on and how to use it. It isn’t something I could recommend to most of my friends but maybe some day we could have a Zorin OS-like experience where trying to install a .deb on Fedora will seamlessly install it in an Ubuntu container without the user having to know what is happening. (I wonder if there’s security implications with using Snap within an Ubuntu distrobox container on a Fedora host?)
That was my point, it’s a pro for Ubuntu that you don’t have to worry about this out of the box, but on Fedora you’d need to know to avoid Flatpak Chromium/Firefox browsers if security is a concern. As mentioned before, installing Snap also doesn’t look like a good solution for Fedora users and again it’s something a user would have to know to do.
I mainly judge operating systems for what they offer out of the box. Having obscure or time consuming workarounds which require prior knowledge to utilize do not change things for the average computer user. Most will not (and do not want to) develop more technical knowledge and perform manual configurations to their system. They’re mostly going to stick to default settings and operate entirely within what the GUI suggests they should do, such as installing apps from the graphical app store where the specific package they get is determined by the distro-selected app store.