A thought on desktop Linux.

So, reading http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-09-10-desktop-linux.html the other day, I was reminded of an idea I had a long time ago. Build a Linux distro that locks down the entire computing experience. Really? Yep. Linux has lots of cool flexibility, but for 99% of the time on a desktop/laptop/end-user-device I don't need any of it. Gimme Gimp or an editor or something and just let me do my work. Here's how I think it should work. You install it, and it works. There's a handful of pre-built apps, each of which runs in its own sandbox. Think VMs, or chroot jails, or something like that. The apps are installed from a central system app, which these days would have to be named "App Store" or something like that. Data created by the individual apps would be managable by the central system app, maybe to allow backing up and copying or moving files between apps. The system would be setup to auto-detect and auto-configure the most common hardware, and to integrate with the most common network environments. Sharing files and printing with windows and macs should be easy. The point is, you don't get "root" access. You don't have to "apt-get" anything, or "yum" anything else. When there's a new kernel, it just downloads and installs. (As a detail, the boot loader should be tied into this system so if a new kernel does not work, the previous one is just booted instead, and an error report is filed back to the maintainers.) Obviously, if your entire network is made up of just these systems, then they should work together in some kind of seamless way. No one should ever have to know about CUPS or Samba or 1000 other little details. One of the "apps" would probably be a Posix shell. Like the other apps, you'd be locked in a sandbox, but you'd have all the little shell things that you might like for writing a script or downloading and compiling a whatever. Ideally the system would be malleable enough that you could install software and play around, but by going back to the app store you could effortlessly delete an instance of it and make a new one if it went badly. Anyhow, I had rather thought that I would probably pay somewhere around $99 per year for such a thing. I bet that other people would do the same.