Idea: overlayfs for user terminal
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Hi,
I think that not being able to install packages with apt in terminal can be frustrating for many new users who expect to escape a locked-down environment like Android, and find complete freedom in Ubuntu Touch. And somehow we tell them they should not do apt commands, it can be frustrating fir newcomers and give the impression that it's actually another locked-down system.
The read-only filesystem is a very valid strategy to avoid breaking the system with a few commands.
I would like to propose and idea to keep the main filesystem read only, while allowing the user to play freely in the terminal without risking to break the rest of the system:
Why not mount an overlayfs over "/" and pivot_root in the environment of the user terminal? Like this the user could do whatever they want in their terminal without any risk of breaking the rest of the system. On top of that it would reduce the tendency of advanced users to remount rw the filesystem to install small utilities with apt. It would also allow for more experimentation on the system. And it could allow to install deb with less restriction on partition size.
