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Comment by dj2stein9 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, talk about being out of touch with the real world. Developers, especially Linux developers, really need to give up on this whole "Desktop" operating system idea. It's not going to work. It is already dead. And I can hardly believe we are still using these ancient systems for many tasks even today. There is no future in WIMP, and people really need to stop developing these Windows clones already. It was lame 10 years ago. If you are still working on desktop OS clones today, you so are terribly out of touch with the real world there really is no hope for you or your product. Get over it.

Touch-based (and by extension, NUI-based) OS'es and mobile applications are the future. Windows always sucked. Mac OS always sucked. Every desktop OS ever built sucked because it is a horrible way to use a computer. Nobody ever really wanted to use these terrible desktop metaphor systems... they only ever did because they had to.

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I'm sorry but none of that is even vaguely true, as true or false as something can be when it is entirely opinion.

Touch screens are to desktops as push bikes are to tractors. You need both. Some people even use both. Or just one. Or neither.

Maybe you feel this way because you've been driving a tractor around all this time and you feel like you've been wasting your time, however some of us (I imagine a lot of us on HN) like to do farming occasionally :-)

That reminds me of the John Ford quote:

  "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

People do not desire better desktop operating systems. They want computers to disappear. It simply does not matter how good this awesome new, secure, desktop OS is because it's built for a world that doesn't exist anymore.

Henry Ford. And he appears to have never actually said it. And this attitude cost Ford the early lead in market share.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/henry_ford_never_said_the_fa...

Okay so I mistakenly wrote his first name... I don't see how that invalidates what I've said.

What's there to "invalidate"? You just made an assertion, not an argument.

You say that nobody wants to use desktops and people want computers to disappear. Unlike you, I don't believe that already, so do you have some evidence for it?

The blogpost I linked pointed out that this quote is often used not to justify a particular idea or position but instead to justify not paying attention to your audience. Paying attention doesn't mean groveling or completely giving up all of your own control.

The funny thing is that I parsed the quote verbatim on the first pass and it made me think the quote was referring to westerns -- John Ford being the famous movie actor.

Took my old brain a second or two to realize that I had previously heard that quote associated with Henry Ford.

John Ford is the famous western director, not so much an actor. Though I'm sure he did some stuff. Or is there another John Ford associated with westerns?

Oops, you're right, the director.

If you ask people what they want now, they will say touch screens. That doesn't mean it's the future.

That's a great quote, and it is definitely true that often times users don't know what they want until they've been shown it.

However, we still use horses as transport. Sure, it's often just for pleasure, but the Police still use them, and rural people still use them, or people in mountains etc, because in those situations they are still better than anything Ford came up with.

So I don't think that quote is relevant here. People have accepted 'post-pcs' into their lives and they are good at lots of things. There are things that larger 'real' computers are better at though, and I don't see any evidence that will change.

that was actually Samuel Ford

I think you're missing the context here. This system is not about UI. It's not about desktop experience either. It's about making sure your email client is so separated from your $BUSINESS_APPLICATION, that exploiting one does not allow you to access anything on the other - and doing that without relying on handcrafted libvirt configs and hopefully without much processing overhead.

I guess the desktop environment was just a random choice of "this works, so just leave it in" from whatever distribution they started with.

That already exists: it's called a web browser.

Granted, browsers aren't without their security holes, but then again, neither are operating systems. Given the amount of effort being put into browsers to make them secure (especially Chrome), my money's on that.

That's exactly why this system goes further. In a browser, it's usually enough to exploit the browser's chrome to get to other sites. Or exploit the browser's binary to get to other apps.

This system goes at least 2 layers deeper. System itself makes sure that each window has its own desktop environment and can't see others. Hardware takes care about the separation between security containers the apps are running in. Protection of the app itself is just the first line of defence and is not going away, so whatever sandboxing exists in the browser still applies.

They are also talking about protecting hardware sharing from being used to cross boundaries which is another layer of paranoia (not unwarranted)

Websites aren't sufficiently sandboxed from each other though. Otherwise we wouldn't have CSRF, XSS and Click Jacking attacks.

If you build a webmail client, you need to know all about these attack vectors, and you need to go out of your way to prevent your application from being susceptible to them. Websites are insecure by default.

I don't trust a web browser with my email at all. Not yet. If I were to use webmail, I'd make sure to set up a separate instance of Firefox to run it in, with it's own profile. I will continue to use Thunderbird for now though.

I'm not against the idea of using webmail, I just don't think the web is secure enough yet.

This is what AppArmor and SELinux are for.

In many cases yes, but there are additional issues Qubes is taking care of. For example AppArmor could only restrict your access to Xorg completely - but once you have access, you can read anything from the screen.

I'm going to go ahead and guess that the people behind Qubes were worrying less about the fact that the desktop paradigm may be fundamentally flawed in terms of usability (not going to argue on that one), but more about security, which is the stated goal of the project. Desktops may be on the way out, but that doesn't mean that we can't do some very basic security work on the heart of the OS. Looking at some of the documentation, it appears that their VM-per-application-group idea could scale very well to touch- and app-based interfaces with some work.

Security has a vital place in every OS, regardless of the skin you put over the top of it.

You made a lot of assertions there, but in my opinion, there's nothing like a desktop computer for day-to-day use. The future may be in touch-based applications, but if it is, it's going to tough to get anything accomplished in it. Maybe I'm just clinging to my guns and desktop computer, but I don't think I'm alone in that.

The reason i don't think this is funny is because it's compromising the maturity of this community. Please create a new thread stating your grievances, instead of distracting things.

So please explain to me: what the hell does the input method (keyboard, mouse, touchscreen) have to do with the low-level security properties of a system? If anything, the switch to tablets and thus more ubiquitous computing makes security an extremely critical issue (see the many discussions about permission systems, application sandboxes, malware leaking personal information etc...). It will become even more pressing in the future, if you think about devices that are controlled by thought (EEG etc...).

Think of a java applet in a browser catching all your keyboard input for instance; the general idea is that secure system must guarantee that user input goes where intended and only there.

Sure. Of course. But my point is, how is that different for touch screen-based input or a real keyboard? The grandparent poster seems to think that in the post-pc era, security problems disappear in puffs of colored icons and magical gestures.

That is seriously retarded. You don't use your computer to do actual work, do you? Because the keyboard simply is the best way to do things that are not downloading porn and browsing Facebook.

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