Comment by mjr00
1 day ago
Right, which goes back to the main point; "total control of your computing environment" fundamentally means that you are responsible for figuring out which applications to trust, based on your own choice of heuristics (FOSS? # of downloads/Github stars? Project age? Reputation of maintainers and file host? etc...) Many, maybe most people don't actually want to do this, and would much rather outsource that determination of trust to Microsoft/Google/Apple.
> Right, which goes back to the main point; "total control of your computing environment" fundamentally means that you are responsible for figuring out which applications to trust, based on your own choice of heuristics
Hard disagree. Total control of my computing environment would be to allow an application access to my documents, a space to save a configuration, perhaps my Videos folder or even certain files in that folder. Or conversely, not.
At the moment, none of the desktops give me the ability to set a level of trust for an application. I can't execute Dr. Robotniks Ring Run (or whatever the example was) and be able to specify what it can, or cannot access. There may be a request for permission at a system level access, but that could be explained away as usually is for iApps and Android when requesting some scary sounding permission groups.
And it also doesn't stop malware from accessing my documents. Sometimes my Mac asks if an application is allowed to access Documents, but it isn't consistent.
Technically you can do all that with on Linux with SELinux. But it's not the default, nor is it easy.
> it's not the default, nor is it easy.
That's really the main point for me. Flatpak could also a lot of this, but Flatseal isn't the default, nor is it easy for users.
MacOS has a bunch of switches for access, but they are hidden away inside the settings, and they are not granular.
If it's not the default, and it's not easy then it may as well not be there for most people.
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