It's not "apps are packaged with all their dependencies inside a private directory hierarchy". That is true of both, yes. But it is also true of Canonical's Snap format, and 0install, and of AppImage, and of NeXTstep & Mac OS X's .app bundles. In other words, it is far from unique.
The real difference with Gobo is twofold:
• Most of the others preserve significant elements of the traditional xNix directory layout. macOS in the main OS if not inside the bundles; Flatpak and Snap inside the apps; and so on. Gobo gets rid of it everywhere, top to bottom, from kernel to text editor.
• Flatpak, Snap etc. are just app-packaging systems. Even on OSes which use Flatpak exclusively – and PopOS is a poor example here; better ones are Fedora SilverBlue or EndlessOS, with read-only root filesystems, no package manager at all, and OS updates using `ostree` – the directory layout is conventional. Like macOS, the app directory structure is entirely separate from the OS directory structure. In Gobo they are one and the same.
I think you're missing the point here.
It's not "apps are packaged with all their dependencies inside a private directory hierarchy". That is true of both, yes. But it is also true of Canonical's Snap format, and 0install, and of AppImage, and of NeXTstep & Mac OS X's .app bundles. In other words, it is far from unique.
The real difference with Gobo is twofold:
• Most of the others preserve significant elements of the traditional xNix directory layout. macOS in the main OS if not inside the bundles; Flatpak and Snap inside the apps; and so on. Gobo gets rid of it everywhere, top to bottom, from kernel to text editor.
• Flatpak, Snap etc. are just app-packaging systems. Even on OSes which use Flatpak exclusively – and PopOS is a poor example here; better ones are Fedora SilverBlue or EndlessOS, with read-only root filesystems, no package manager at all, and OS updates using `ostree` – the directory layout is conventional. Like macOS, the app directory structure is entirely separate from the OS directory structure. In Gobo they are one and the same.
I wrote about that here, and you may find it worth a read: https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/03/nixos_linux_os_design...