Comment by liveoneggs
12 hours ago
unix (and linux) has always been multi user. It is as easy as it gets for multi-user workflows in every context. It was, literally, built for it.
You can run each of your virtual desktops as their own user. You can run individual apps on the same desktop as different user accounts. Hundreds of separate users can login to the same computer. My own computer, right now, has 40 different user accounts running stuff in the background.
I can't even think of a scenario where using separate users is difficult.
> You can run each of your virtual desktops as their own user. You can run individual apps on the same desktop as different user accounts.
Literally never have I ever seen any of the desktop environments integrate this conveniently, albeit CLIs are better in that regard. "You can" isn't the same as "it's the idiomatic approach to doing X". Same with installing packages in a per-user way, so a bad package can't harm anything outside of its sandbox (which in practice you achieve with containers, but those can be inconvenient to work with and you'd probably want VMs for more security anyways). You can have many users, sure, but all it takes is one bad system-wide package, one bad script executed as root (e.g. install scripts, compromised packages) or even not being careful enough with file permissions and things go wrong.
Contrast that to Qubes: https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/introduction/intro.html#q...
Now that was literally built for such a use case (it's based on isolated VMs and works well with Linux distros inside those, really cool project).