#0216
DisplayContainersSnapshots
The computer lab is a folder of URLs
The electronics course needs KiCad and FreeCAD on twenty machines. There is no lab budget, and the students own Chromebooks, hand-me-down laptops, and tablets.
You build the environment once: one container, both apps installed and configured. Snapshot it. Clone it twenty times: each clone is ready in seconds. Each student gets their own container's display URL: a real Linux desktop running real engineering software, in whatever browser their device has. Touch devices work: tap is click.
When someone wrecks their setup mid-semester, you restore their snapshot. Idle containers cost almost nothing; copy-on-write clones and a shared kernel's page cache fold the twenty near-identical environments into barely more than one.
A computer lab used to be a room. This one is a bookmark folder.