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Comment by tumblewit | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of Windows 10 itself. A fresh install of windows 10 has all its builtin apps including the calculator (for currency I am guessing) allowed through the firewall by default. In the security world, the default should be off and only upon request should an app allowed to talk over the network. Not to mention the fact that apps like Facebook messenger are installed by default in Windows. Microsoft can sell me their operating system in a minute if they just stop all the stupid telemetry, remove the bloat and by default turn all privacy and security options to on and not off. It's not a bad operating system for most people, it's just a privacy nightmare that Microsoft seems to be fine with somehow. Because no matter what your privacy 'policy' is, the best policy is to not collect any data at all.

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> In the security world, the default should be off and only upon request should an app allowed to talk over the network.

I'd argue that reasonable defaults are better. Asking permission for everything, including features most to all people would find necessary, just creates decision fatigue and results in people clicking "allow" on every popup.

I think the only reasonable default is to not talk unless I've given permission for it to do so.

But I recognize that I'm in the minority. So much so that I can't trust software to behave itself, so I've had to use my firewall to disable all outbound traffic by default, so I can add exceptions as needed.

It's amazing how rarely such exceptions are actually needed.

I'm with you. Paranoid defaults should be the default defaults

Although I'd still like to be able to opt-in to reasonable defaults if I trust that my OS's non-default default decisions are indeed reasonable.

I agree and I think mobile got that part of sandboxing wrong. I think a better solution is to sandbox by default, give the application no way of being able to tell if it has permissions or not, and making the user manually go in and grant it permissions as they find they actually need them. This would incentivise application developers to try and use as few permissions as they could possibly get away with.

However, it would also require a really good, understandable interface for granting permissions to applications. Files are relatively straight forward, as the file open/save dialog can be handled by the OS and anything the user does with it can be considered explicit permission. For other resources something similar might work, or might need a completely different abstraction.

> I think a better solution is to ... give the application no way of being able to tell if it has permissions or not...

As an Android developer, I strongly disagree with this. Even if I never prompted for permissions, giving me the ability to determine what permissions I have allows me to make certain the application behaves properly with the permissions it does have.

Unfortunately it also allows you to pester the user to change them and, as we've learned, we can't trust applications not to act like they need permissions when they really don't.

Ok, how about a compromise: We'll let the application be able to tell by default, but the user can can choose to lie to it.

While it's taken Android some time, on newer APIs the system will simply prevent an app from requesting permissions if a user has denied it more than once. From https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requestin...:

"At the same time, your app should respect the user's decision to deny a permission. Starting in Android 11 (API level 30), if the user taps Deny for a specific permission more than once during your app's lifetime of installation on a device, the user doesn't see the system permissions dialog if your app requests that permission again."

Maybe something in the middle. One time, during initial setup, the OS should have a single question with all of the reasonable defaults displayed (and uncheckable). Tell people why these are reasonable, give them an opportunity to opt-out, make it easy to move forward quickly.

"Decision fatigue" is an apt phrase. Reminds me of Joel Spolsky's old essay on classic Windows help asking what kind of help db install I wanted ("compact", etc.) -- to which no normal user ever had an answer.

Don't ask people questions that they are going to answer one way 95% or more of the time, or for which they haven't the context to answer. Just make it easy to change later if you need to.

reasonable defaults are way better, or you'd end up with something like SELinux where nothing works out of the box

> Microsoft can sell me their operating system in a minute if they just stop all the stupid telemetry, remove the bloat and by default turn all privacy and security options to on and not off

I don't think Microsoft is in the business of selling desktop OSs anymore, despite the fact that they still charge money for them. All of their behavior suggests complete disdain for the desktop and users of the desktop. I think Windows is only still being developed because it is a delivery platform for ads and telemetry. For the moment I'll still take it over the alternatives, but I'm confident Microsoft will eventually push me over the edge.

The question as always is what you could replace it with. We have an unfortunate situation where Microsoft had a near-monopoly on the desktop for so long that credible alternatives are lacking for many users. Even if they like some particular flavour of Apple or *nix as an OS, the applications they need might not be available on that platform. I wonder what the forever-defenders of Windows think they will do if Microsoft continues along the course set by Nadella and the current senior team and the situation with intrusions and lack of control over your own equipment continues to deteriorate.

Honestly I'm probably just going to stop using computers so much if that happens. Linux Desktop has consistently proven that it has no interest in doing anything in a sane or consistent manner, and Apple is just as bad as Microsoft in terms of fucking shit up for no reason, only in different ways.

If we're very very lucky, something like Haiku will gain a hypervisor, WINE port, and graphical acceleration, then take off in popularity and become the last refuge of the desktop. I'm pretty skeptical it'll go down like that though.

> Honestly I'm probably just going to stop using computers so much if that happens.

The state of mobile software (including the OS) has become so awful that I've already decided to stop using a smartphone entirely.

> Linux Desktop has consistently proven that it has no interest in doing anything in a sane or consistent manner

Could you explain that a bit more?

Yes, but I won't because I find that posts like yours are only interested in performative argumentation for the sake of convincing some nebulous group of "future readers" that Linux Desktop is worth considering.

I'll save you the trouble: Dear readers, Linux Desktop is fine if you like the way it works. I encourage using tools you like. If you haven't tried it, it might work for you.

I don't like the way works, I've expounded upon the details many times, and I'm not interested in further performative argumentation on the subject.

This weekend I was traveling with my kubuntu machine and despite searching for at least 20 minutes, I was unable to find the controlpanel/settings page/widget/app that will allow me to connect a WiFi network, so I gave up and switched to gnome.

Who do you imagine this "Linux Desktop" is, that you attribute lack of interest to?

Various groups make desktop environments that may be used on Linux, as diverse as KDE, Gnome, Chrome, and Android. It could possibly make sense to complain about one or other of them, or even several. As it is your complaint is entirely nonsensical, a category error like saying red is too hot.

> Who do you imagine this "Linux Desktop" is

The community of people who make and distribute Linux distributions and software intended for the Desktop use case, when taken as a whole.

> Various groups make desktop environments that may be used on Linux, as diverse as KDE, Gnome, Chrome, and Android.

Calling Android or ChromeOS a Linux Desktop is incredibly disingenuous.

> It could possibly make sense to complain about one or other of them, or even several.

Every distribution has the same problems because they are all built with more or less the same hodgepodges of desperately developed software.

> Every distribution has the same problems because they are all built with more or less the same hodgepodges of desperately developed software.

In other words, slightly better than trying to change system settings in Windows 10?

Well no. The new settings panels in Windows 10 certainly do suck ass and contribute to the general UI fragmentation, but the systems that are the foundation of the Windows operating system are not disparately developed hodgepodges. The same cannot be said for Linux Desktop, although with SystemD taking over everything that might not remain true indefinitely.

With ARM, the lack of control might deteriorate even further. While the underlying architecture might not have much to do with it, the accelerators in these SOCs just give more options for Microsoft to collect data and lock down devices even further.

I have the opposite experience. MS has enabled our company to save tens of thousands of dollars because of their unwillingness to compromise on backwards compat. Literally we take CD's burned a decade(s) ago and the software installs and functions just fine. In our field, software tends to cost five digits and upwards so its a big F* deal. I can't imagine any other vendor coming even close. I don't particularly care for their other products, but Windows has earned a ton of respect from me.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I still choose Windows over the other desktop OSs. PowerShell is also great. The problem is that they take this great base and plaster a slow, dysfunctional, half-thought-out, user-hostile interface on top of it stuffed with telemetry, ads, and dark patterns designed to push you to their cloud services.

Agreed, No argument there.

Enterprise desktop is still a cash cow.

I've never seen Facebook Messenger installed in Windows by default, having installed Windows 10 thousands of times. This sounds like it is included manufacturer bloatware.

Same here; I've installed emost variations of Win 10 (and all server editions, etc.) and seen lots of bloatware but never Facebook. Though I'm in the UK if that matters.

Apparently they had a telemetry setting they added a while back which they called "security" which they renamed a year or so ago to "Diagnostic Data Off" to better encompass what it is:

The "Diagnostic Data Off" — formerly Security — should be exactly that, as Microsoft has long defined the option as "only the diagnostic data info that is required to keep Windows devices ... protected with the latest security updates." The company admits to some collecting — OS, device ID, device class — but the option waives all user content and data that might finger the user, including company name.[1]

I think that option is only available in the Enterprise edition though, so if you want to pay them for it, it might be a bit pricey compared to other options, at ~$84/year (if you can even buy it for a single account, I have no idea).

1: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3532008/microsoft-elim...

Perhaps Microsoft want to know what numbers you are using, for marketing purposes /s.

Not to mention Candy Crush

That was a icon that initiated an install of the App from the App Store.

Kind of, however it was/is a bit more persistent than that, when you removed the icon trace (from menu and possbily add/remove), it would still re-instate itself on the next major windows update. It was kind of like the tellytubbies windows xp theme coming back every couple of weeks

I know it is sad, but I used to chuckle to myself every time it happened and say "time for tubby bye byes!" as I changed it to something else. I was younger then.

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