Shutting Down Clear Linux OS

Knowing which projects/languages/frameworks to invest time into and which to skip (even if they produce useful subprojects) is a superpower these days.

Debian, FreeBSD.. the longstanding community software is immune from these kinds of rug pulls.

Yes, but you pay a real cost for those choices too. A management plane that is non deterministic, imperative, and full of highly mutable state, not to mention basic stuff like the package manager metadata and cache not being shareable, and package installs all having to be serialized because they all call shell scripts as root. These limitations constrain even tools like dagger from providing a first class interface to apt like there is for apk because any deb could have rm -rf / as the postinstall script.

A lot of normal users don’t feel these pain points or tolerate them by sidestepping the whole affair with containers or VM images. But if you’re in a position where these things have an impact it can be extremely motivating to seek out others who are willing to experiment with different ways of doing things.

I'll bet $20 your solution to the problems you posed is "Nix"