AppStore Preferences can be unlocked by a local admin with any bogus password

On the other you have giving access to your data to people who shouldn't have access, be it making them root, giving your encryption password in the hint field, ... You're not prepared against that, you have no mitigation and no remedy other than picking the right tool; either the tool you're using is secure or it is not.

Better everything gets deleted than someone not meant to have access getting it. And better something happens that I could insure myself against, than something against which I cannot do anything to protect myself.

Because that right there is the problem when you are dealing with systems with lots of interconnected components. There just isn't enough time for the "randomly try to break anything" phase.

The exception is the kernels and drivers of each OS, which have to consider things like architecture, but I would expect that it'll still be the same individual engineers working on these who always have, no matter what their team structure looks like now. Whether or not Apple has a formal "macOS kernel team" or "iOS kernel team", those groups definitely exist and have rather static membership.

(In fact, one main benefit you might see from this is that Apple has hardware hires—many from Intel[1]—who have stepped up to apply their knowledge of formal verification methods to the iOS kernel and drivers, but haven't necessarily had the flexibility to spread that love to macOS. That can change now.)

[1] https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/ (search for "Apple")

For the Darwin team which is the actual core OS they would have to deal a lot with CPU architectures. But they again they have always dealt with this since back in the NeXT days. ARM and x86 isn't a big deal to manage and there isn't much evidence that something is wrong in that area.

For the UI teams i.e. System Frameworks, Cocoa, WindowServer etc. They are abstracted away from worrying about CPU architectures and they are the ones responsible for all the bugs we are seeing today. You can argue context switching is an issue here but again we don't have much visibility that iOS/OSX engineers are jumping back and forth every day.

Well, all commercial UNIXes had them before Linux was even a thing.

The criticism towards Gnome 3 is due to the reduced usability, customizability, constant breaking of backwards compatibility (especially when it comes to parts that allow customization), treating the desktop like an overgrown tablet and a general tendency of its developers to treat their users like they don't know what they are doing - if not outright ignore them. For examples, check out Reddit's /r/linux whenever anything towards Gnome is posted to get an idea of what people are actually saying about it (both positive and negative).

> (due to patent concerns). Of course, there are some fringe "garage effort" Linux distros that don't care about patents and do just give some part of the community what they want.

Sorry, but this phrase is incredibly loaded. Are you affiliated with Gnome? Let me try to break it down:

"due to patent concerns" - this is textbook FUD that tries to present Gnome as a project that cares about patents (why would Gnome care about patents any more or less than other projects?) and create the impression that other desktops do not care. Moreover it implies (but doesn't explicitly say so that it can be denied later on) as granted that patents are indeed a concern for an open source desktop environment to the point that not only it is worth mentioning but actually Gnome making an active effort towards avoiding patents by redesigning their UI.

"there are some fringe "garage effort" Linux distros" - implying that any distribution that does not share Gnome 3's concern (assuming they exist and isn't just an excuse) is a fringe and garage effort. BTW i've noticed this with several Gnome developers: they tend to downplay anyone and anything that doesn't fit in their worldview as unimportant (for fun, try to ask them about Wayland and X11 and suggest that Xorg will continue to exist after -say- 5 years - some cannot even fathom the idea that even if all Xorg developers lose their senses, others can fork the project and continue its development just like the Xorg devs forked XFree86 and just like XFree86 was forked from X386).

"that don't care about patents" - again the implication that patents are something that Gnome alone cares about and that only unimportant, fringe garage effort distributions can ignore them, but Gnome - being the big and serious project that it is - has to abide by the patent masters and...

"just give some part of the community what they want." - ...being unable to give to the community what they want. Although i have to say, i like the backhanded "some part" here and the implication that it is only a small part of the community that wants something better.

Of course the entire phrase is based on the assumption that a) patents matter so much that Gnome has to design their UI around them and that b) everything else that does something closer to what the users actually want can only do it because it is fringe and unimportant. Both being false of course since there are tons of other efforts that are as important as Gnome while giving to users all sorts of options - with KDE being the obvious elephant in the room, but also with efforts such as Cinnamon, Budgie, elementaryOS/Panteon, etc. Also avoiding working on stuff because they might be patented (and honestly, most of the stuff users want - like a desktop, icons, a start menu, etc - are things that even if they were patented would have their patents expired by now - again assuming these patents are even valid and enforceable) is a fool's errand since patents exist for pretty much everything and the best an open source project can do is simply ignore them unless someone comes after a project at which point you can try to change the specific part that is a problem. It isn't like anyone can even kill a project or anything, otherwise even Linux would be dead.

Honestly i dislike this sort of "implied mudslinging" towards a ton of other projects and efforts, trying to paint them in a negative way in an attempt to both give excuses for why Gnome is the way it is today and downplay not just the concerns of its users but the users themselves as unimportant.

Try to avoid it please. I don't know if you are a Gnome developer or just an overenthusiastic user, but attacking every single other project that isn't Gnome on nebulous and arbitrary grounds is not the best way to make a good impression.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-laptop/p/90f...

High Sierra switches solid state drives to the new APFS file system and the WindowServer is now rewritten to use Metal2.

So I would suggest that High Sierra is far from a stability release like Snow Leopard was. It was about ripping out the foundations and building new ones. The APFS transition, to Apple’s credit has been mostly painless while the WindowServer changes has been hit miss depending on your hardware.

These were things Apple had to do and they benefit all their platforms.

The global prefs that can be reconfigured by "regular users" (i.e. non-"sharing only" users) are precisely those prefs required to keep the system in a working state if you're physically in possession of it and doing the things that possession of a computer implies. For example, you can move a computer you physically possess to a new location–at which point the same wireless networks won't be available, and maybe you won't be able to get online without a proxy. So, in order to ensure that just going places doesn't necessitate a call to corporate IT, the default† is to let any non-"sharing only" user configure networking.

† "Default" because these prefs can be locked down using a configuration profile (like a windows Group Policy Object) by corporate IT if they need a computer specifically secured against these changes, such as a public-use kiosk.

I fail to see how automatic updates would be "awful".