Comment by fdgdasfadsf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fdgdasfadsf | Hacker News Reader

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> Every piece of software should run within a sandbox

I sort of agree with this but I think more in terms of projects/activities (e.g. casual media consumption, banking, working on different projects) rather than applications. To do different activities I need different combinations of tools but often the tools overlap. For example I want to sandbox the browser I use for watching cat videos on youtube from the browser I use for banking from the various browsers I use for work. So that some drive by on a casual browsing site can't attack my banking. But I don't want two browsers installed I want the same program in the same version with some common and some different config - but I don't want to manage the common config in 5 different places.

The multi-user model allows for some attempt at this if one sets up multiple user accounts for the different activities. It certainly isn't sufficient but I'm not sure that sandboxing each application will actually get us there either.

I've been thinking about this many times before and while I want to like the idea, I always come to the conclusion that multi user setups sharing "some" data easily becomes too complex for users to handle.

Your example of the browser for example, how do you know what is common config? What if changing a common config in cat-mode exposes a security vulnerability in bank-mode? And are you really going to log out of cat mode into common mode just to change a small setting?

Sharing files is another one of my favorites, say for example that me and my brother like the same music and share one computer with different log ins. We want to save space on the hard drive so we share all our mp3 with each other. But I might have some music or recordings I dont want to share, how should I handle that.

Windows XP tried very hard to get this working, for example your desktop and start menu was a blend of what was installed as a shared application (remember "install for all users/only for me"?) and what was installed for one user. Later if someone renamed things on what they thought was their desktop it would be renamed on everybody else's desktop also, it was very confusing even for me as a developer who knows how it works. Windows also has the concept of a dedicated shared folder and possibility to share additional folders, sounds so simple but I've never seen anyone set it up smoothly. Everything looks so good and simple on paper but requires just a tiny bit of user education and that's where the whole concept falls.

It is relatively easy to have multiple users sessions open at the same time. Whether this is a good idea with X windows GUIs is another matter.

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