This is highly unpopular here, but I think we need something like the iOS/Android permission system on the desktop. Windows Metro apps do this, but they are hig

This is highly unpopular here, but I think we need something like the iOS/Android permission system on the desktop. Windows Metro apps do this, but they are highly maligned here. I expect it’s the walled garden strategy that is unpopular with a techie crowd, not the idea that an OS should have more nuanced permissions than (to a first approximation) “any installer is either crippled or root”. A lot of us have been concerned about the very coarse security model in mainstream OSes for decades, but there’s a huge amount of momentum behind the Windows, macOS and Linux ecosystems now. Any new platform with a fundamentally better security and application management system would have the usual chicken-and-egg problem in terms of users and software base, and without something else to drive it (such as inventing a whole new type of device with Android and iOS on smartphones) that’s a tough barrier to get over.