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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I find the creep of web app security mentality into the desktop to be a disaster. I want to be able to easily snoop on and control my GUI and I absolutely don’t want some display system to decide it knows better than me about this sort of thing.

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>web app security mentality

Having good security is essential to having a good app platform. You can see a real disaster in how malware operated on Windows a couple decades ago.

>I want to be able to easily snoop on and control my GUI

That don't mean that every random program needs to be able to. If a program is to be able to snoop, it needs to explicitly given the ability to do so.

> That don't mean that every random program needs to be able to. If a program is to be able to snoop, it needs to explicitly given the ability to do so.

I strongly disagree with this, this is how you get inconsistent, annoying computing experiences

I'd perhaps say that security can be a good idea, but it needs to be done well for it to be so. And not at all implementing a potentially-abusable feature, while counting as "secure", is absolutely not doing it well.

I think it's coming from developers with proprietary backgrounds who want to normalize the running of untrusted proprietary software on the Linux desktop, probably from some appstore with abysmal quality standards like Android and iOS. Contrast this mentality with sticking to Free software you downloaded from the official Debian repos.. why do I need to be protected against that software? I don't. These mobile-like desktop protection schemes are designed to facilitate mobile-like software consumption habits. Fuck all of that!

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