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To me it seems like the traditional PC model has too many downsides in terms of cost to support applications from a developer perspective as well as inferior se

by jrs95 9y ago

To me it seems like the traditional PC model has too many downsides in terms of cost to support applications from a developer perspective as well as inferior security in comparison to a more sandboxed model. For most users, a walled garden is better than an open software ecosystem. That being said, I think the best hope we have for an open ecosystem at this point is web applications. They don't have the same downsides as the traditional PC software model. The sandboxing you get with web apps may restrict some of the functionality you could get relative to traditional PC software, but IMO the security benefits are far more important. The risk here is that these all end up being tied to centralized cloud services owned by a handful of giant tech companies, and that's ultimately not as open as we'd like. But it's at least a significant improvement over the App Store model.

michaelmrose 9y ago
A web site is running on someone else's hardware or running on your hardware but dependent upon others resources to operate. In theory you could open the websites sources but since the goal of app stores seems to be finding ways to monetize peoples data or get them to pay you monthly the end result will probably be unfriendly to tinkers, unfree, and closed. This generation will be poorer and dumber than the last.
realusername 9y ago
You can still have a sandboxed model with having the root user accessible, companies don't build that because they don't want the user to have any power on their machine but there's no technical limitation to do it.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I don't know if it still is the case, but in the early OS X adoption days Apple forums were full of people asking how to just run as root. So....
  - realusername 9y ago
    Of course you will always have people to try to run things as root but the option could just be hidden like the developer options on Android with a big warning that enabling root might destroy their phone.

by jrs95 9y ago

michaelmrose 9y ago

A web site is running on someone else's hardware or running on your hardware but dependent upon others resources to operate. In theory you could open the websites sources but since the goal of app stores seems to be finding ways to monetize peoples data or get them to pay you monthly the end result will probably be unfriendly to tinkers, unfree, and closed. This generation will be poorer and dumber than the last.

realusername 9y ago

You can still have a sandboxed model with having the root user accessible, companies don't build that because they don't want the user to have any power on their machine but there's no technical limitation to do it.

pjmlp 9y ago
I don't know if it still is the case, but in the early OS X adoption days Apple forums were full of people asking how to just run as root. So....
- realusername 9y ago
  Of course you will always have people to try to run things as root but the option could just be hidden like the developer options on Android with a big warning that enabling root might destroy their phone.