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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

It really is something I want. But most people do live in your described world. That's the smartphone and "run's every javascript application sent to my web browser automatically" kind of computing security model. But there do exist personal behaviors of desktop operating system use where you can actually trust the applications installed and not put up walls between everything. And then things like keyboard/mouse sharing work, windows return to their places, and screen readers work. Those are all very important to me. For them I'm willing to browse with javascript temp-whitelist-only and many other such tedious things.

What I'm trying to get across is that the need for that kind of intense security model, every process a threat, is not intrinsic to modern computing.

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But what’s the limiting factor of doing the sane and safe thing by default?

The most popular operating systems all do that (ios and android), and they have carved out safe APIs for all of that to work. You can’t patch up a Swiss cheese after the fact.

Is it hard to create standard APIs in a bazaar style of development? Yeah. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not the correct approach.

I think their concern is valid, it's difficult to do something which is both secure AND not limited at the same time.

Sure Android and iOS are secure but in practice they kind of suck for making anything non-standard which limits creativity and freedom.

Can we have both a secure and extendable system? Maybe but none of them exist yet. I'm really worrying that Linux mainstream distros will become like Android or iOS.

Safe and sane for you. Not for everyone.

What use is a safe API when it makes the entire system impossible to use by a significant fraction of the population (ie wayland and the visually disabled)? It's been a decade+ and none of the waylands have managed to support screen readers yet.

Are we to just throw out that whole class of people and tell them, "You don't get to use linux desktop computers anymore when X11 support is dropped". As someone with retinas that are progressively tearing apart, who already uses text to speech for many things, this is incredibly disheartening. I really don't want to have to switch to the Apple ecosystem.

Let’s not fool ourselves, linux’s accessibility (and anything else) support was lackluster to begin with. Android and ios is far far superior on every count from an accessibility perspective and interestingly they have a sane security model.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the technology, it’s just that there is no standard protocol for one more thing simply because accessibility experts don’t happen to do some free work that will be de facto accepted by multiple different vendors. Comparatively, apple or google can just declare that this new API is the way to go, and support it natively from the de facto frameworks of the platform (and probably paid for accessibility experts along the way).

No one wants to use android and iOS for serious desktop work though. Like it's cool when your only interaction with the device is consuming content, definitely not for creating.

You might be living in a bubble. The majority of the population doesn’t have a PC, most people use a smartphone as their only general purpose computer. And while you may not run blender on your phone and render a full-time movie with ray-tracing there, there is absolutely no fundamental limitation, it just so happens to primarily target portable devices, not beasts of a machine with 4 video cards. This functionality requires zero special permission, neither does photoshop (of which there are multiple mobile-versions), or digital painting which, etc.

You would be surprised how many content creator gets by with a single ipad.

Android and iOS are limited operating systems for limited devices. They don't scale up to office workloads.

Certainly not because of their security model, lol. It's because they're phones.

But requiring user permissions for apps to do shady shit is a good thing. Cannot fathom why people are against that.

The security model is not the only factor, but it is one very important factor. Why do I have to open Moebius sync to keep syncthing synchronization running? Why is the whole landscape build under the assumption that a cloud storage is more trustworthy than local storage?

> But requiring user permissions for apps to do shady shit is a good thing.

> Why do I have to open Moebius sync to keep syncthing synchronization running

Because it’s a mobile OS and every single spent CPU cycle is a detriment to battery life? There is absolutely nothing in the security model that would prevent it from running - but it is essential that processes have a “structured” lifetime.

E.g. compare how much more graceful android is in low-memory situations, asking apps to serialize their state and then stopping the last used one. Linux oomkiller will just reap my whole display manager for some reason.

So that's another reason it doesn't scale to office workloads

Sigh. Okay, but Wayland doesn't work this way because it is a Desktop software. I don't understand the complaints here - we're upset that we, the user, are empowered to give and remove permissions from applications?

Nobody is turning Linux into iOS. But iOS DOES have some good ideas. It's good, for example, that for an app to access your photos library they have to ask. I know for a fact you prefer that to the app just opening your photos without your knowledge and doing whatever they want with them.

Similarly, I see no reason why Chrome should be able to read the display output and keyboard inputs of my graphical password manager. It should ask me.

In what way or form? Citation needed.

> You would be surprised how many content creator gets by with a single ipad.

Can you name one professional software developer?

Probably, you can. But I don't want to limit myself to that sub standard environment. I love my iPad for some activities, for others iOS is just impractical.

Pretty sure this specific thing is under similar restrictions on macOS.

The limiting factor is all the use cases that have not been invented yet. Screen sharing would have never been a thing if we started out with Wayland-like restrictions.

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