Virtualisation, Sandboxes, Containers. All terms and technologies used for various reasons. Security is not always the main reason, but considering the details in this article, it is a valid point. It is simple enough to setup a container in your machine. LXC/Linux Containers for example, don’t have as much overhead as a VirtualBox or VMWare virtual machine and can run almost, if not just as fast as a native installation (I’m using LXC for my Docker.io build script), but conceptually, if you use a container, and it is infected with malware, you can drop and rebuild the container, or roll back to a snapshot much more easily than reimaging your machine.

Right now I run three different containers — one is my main Ubuntu Studio, which is not a container, but my core OS. the second is my Docker.io build LXC, which I rebuild everytime I compile (and I now have that tied into Jenkins, so I might put up regular builds somehow), and the final one is a VirtualBox virtual machine that runs Windows 7 so I don’t have to dual boot.

How Splitting A Computer Into Multiple Realities Can Protect You From Hackers | WIRED.