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Comment by result2vino | Hacker News Reader

Can your grandma use SELinux? Delusional.

My Grandma doesn't have a need for backwards compatibility or the million other things that stop Apple from just making a new operating system.

Normal people's use cases for their computer is light file management, light document and productivity workflows and everything else is done in the browser. Hell, most of the document processing and productivity crap is in the browser these days too.

In other words, your grandma could use an iPad rather than a Mac.

This is the real answer - 90% of people can use a phone or an iPad for their general computational needs - and the PC/Mac itself will trend toward that, with harder and harder gates to bypass to get a truly "general" computer.

Chromebooks, actually.

SELinux is for distro and package maintainers to use. Not end users.

And yet for a large number of years any RHEL/CentOS SELinux issues with third party software were answered with "disable SELinux".

Same for Windows' UAC in the Vista era, which doesn't make it bad technology or place the fault on Microsoft. The world is full of terrible development practices, the answer shouldn't be "just disable your security mechanisms".

So you agree that end users do use it and are often incapable of getting the things they want to work with it?

A large number of years up to and including "this year, right now, like, yesterday".

If she has an Android phone, she's already using it.

> delusional

That's rather self critical of you, even if deserved.

My grandma also can't write software, or really do anything advanced, no should she be able to. SELinux, just like any other security and/or containerization technology, is supposed to be used by developers, sysadmins, distribution maintainers. Not by end users.

Is the macos sandbox the odd one out? I'm not familiar with it, but find it very hard to believe that "my grandma" is its target audience.

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