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Comment by markstos | Hacker News Reader

Complex apps can bundle their own dependencies-- that's what the Flatpak and Snap package formats do. You can also run Firefox in a Docker or LXD container with it's dependencies. By sharing the X11 or Wayland socket with the docker, the apps can appear on your main desktop.

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none of those solutions apply the BSDs though

True.

Can you run graphical applications inside a BSD jail?

You can with SSH and X11 forwarding. Whether that's practical is a different question and may vary according to the application and user

You wouldn't need to use SSH, just linking/bind mounting the X socket and xauth into the jail (plus/minus whatever shm stuff).

Pedantic note: Jails are not a BSD concept, they're a FreeBSD concept. OpenBSD has no notion of jails.

Yes. Here's an example for Firefox on FreeBSD: https://wiki.freebsd.org/VladimirKrstulja/Guides/JailingGUIA...

Yes, and it sounds ideal but I've had a recurring problem where having snap installed on a system increases the boot time, and apps hang on load. They stop hanging when I install the native app, and use that instead.

IIRC that's because Snap's are stored compressed and have to be uncompressed when you first run them after boot.

I think that's because Snap is also meant to be used in IOT where disk space is limited but it definitely should be optional on work machines with lots of disk space.

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