My excitement is muted by two things:

1. Every X11 application runs in the same Xserver, so there’s no isolation which would be a massive incentive for adoption.
2. Attempting to run anything Wayland inside a Docker container across the network is doomed to fail. RDP, VNC and the rest of these are a massive loss in functionality compared with X11 across the network.

I want this to work, but so far it just doesn’t.

In case you’re wondering, try running a GUI application on a remote server side by side with one running on another server on the same display and copy/paste data between the two.

Arguing about which browser does not make much sense to me because ultimately to render HTML with CSS in the way that the designer expected is the whole reason you need CSS.

ePub is interesting, but the functionality supported in the HTML is limited, as is CSS support.

You make an interesting point about JavaScript, but in my experience, the use of it is increasing, not decreasing.

I never said that Firefox, Chrome or Safari was required, there are plenty of light(er) weight browsers around, there’s even a Wikipedia page about it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_browsers

My point stands, use a browser.

A browser is specifically designed for rendering HTML and does it better than anything else.

However, if you must, you can use something like pandoc to convert the HTML to something else, like a PDF or an Office document.

An alternative is to use a text only browser like lynx.

The ides that a browser is overkill is only true if you don’t already have one installed and only if you’re happy to put up with half baked rendering.

So … use a browser.

Depends entirely on what “Production” means. In a corporate environment it means something completely different from a homelab

If you’re doing this for real, you’d have two identical environments.

If it’s playing with Docker or Kubernetes, you don’t need anything more than a VM with Linux and Docker.

If you want to get serious, you can also set up a sandbox on EC2.

All well and good, but that doesn’t cover “better”. Does this mean apt-get et. al. were improved, or just apt? Where’s the documentation for this “improvement”?

Hence my question.

Anyone got a link to a meaningful description of improvement, rather than “pretty colours” and a “better package solver”?

My most frequent use of apt is inside a Dockerfile, so care factor on UI is not high and “better” isn’t a measurable metric.

Very cool idea and a fun project if you have a masochistic streak or a unique use case.

Also … would running the other distro inside a docker container qualify because the processes are actually running on the same kernel albeit side-by-side with the native OS, or is this disqualified like using chroot?

Nothing and everything.

There are thousands if not millions of open source solutions scattered around society. Some are feature complete, most are not. Some are maintained, many are not. A handful are funded, the rest is not.

What open source needs, more than anything else is fundraising and the means to distribute those funds to the tune of the trillions of dollars that the corporate world extracts in profits from those open source efforts.

In other words, the people who make this need to get paid.

Firefox terms and conditions, Red Hat, and several other projects that have caused uproar through the community, are all caused by the need to get paid to eat food and have a roof over your head whilst you contribute to society and give away your efforts.