5 ms·

Am I the only one who wants a modern OS designed for single-user use as opposed to one that descends from a long line of time-sharing systems? That isn’t a mobi

• andai 8y ago
  I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm becoming a big fan of minimalism and simplicity. I find it particularly funny that Android is based on an OS designed for thousands of simultaneous users (although they did get some nice security / isolation out of it).
  • paulddraper 8y ago
    > although they did get some nice security / isolation out of it It's hard to understate this. The rampant security vulns of Windows were due largely to its heritage as a single user, sparingly networked computer.
    • snazz 8y ago
      As much as I agree with this, are security and single-user truly mutally exclusive, or is it just that all the single user operating systems we know of (correct me if I'm wrong) have poor security records?
      • phamilton 8y ago
        Solving multi user inherently results in building isolation which translates well to security.
        • earenndil 8y ago
          But you can build isolation as a part of single user.
          • phamilton 8y ago
            Absolutely. I'm not saying you can't build it, I'm just saying that P(correct security | correct multi user) > P(correct security) because you already have an isolation mechanism in place.
            • earenndil 8y ago
              Not necessarily. You can design your isolation system to be better suited to a single user system, rather than hacking it into a system which was meant to support multiple human users.
              • phamilton 8y ago
                Again, not disagreeing. Just saying that in aggregate, and from looking at history, the requirement of isolation in multi user systems trends towards better security. You can absolutely build a better single user system.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Oh, ransomware only succeeds because of improper user permissions? Really? Placing the security around users is used by server operating systems to protect shared resources from malicious users. It is completely useless at protecting a user's resources from malicious applications run by that user. The mobile OSs got this right in that the put the permissions on the applications instead.
      • paulddraper 8y ago
        > Oh, ransomware only succeeds because of improper user permissions? Strawman; that's not what I said. In the late 90s/early 00s you could get pwned on Windows by opening an email.
        • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
          That's still true today, potentially if not in actual fact. The user-based permission model does absolutely nothing to change this.
  • wool_gather 8y ago
    The same is true of iOS, incidentally.
• tacostakohashi 8y ago
  Not at all. I have been installing Windows 10 inside some VMs for running windows applications lately, and that's a pretty ridiculous experience when the host OS is the one really doing all the heavy lifting for multi-user and authentication, and one really just needs a thin windows runtime for applications inside the VM, not a full-blown "operating system" (a awkward description for Windows 10, considering how much shovelware it comes with).
• scroot 8y ago
  I'd like a Smalltalk machine with a Platinum-like UI
• Koshkin 8y ago
  I am not sure if you would want to run all your software as ‘root’.
  • Spivak 8y ago
    Just because a system is single user doesn't mean there can't be a permission system and/or multiple levels of privilege.
    • whatshisface 8y ago
      If you have a permission system and multiple levels of privilege, why not password-protect the different levels? I guess we would also want to name them. In fact, another cool feature would be remote desktop like Windows has. So we should have permissions, in named groups that you have to know the password to access, and I should be able to log in to them remotely. Sounds like a time-sharing system to me.
      • Spivak 8y ago
        The user doesn't have multiple levels of privilege, applications do.
        • Koshkin 8y ago
          Which simply means the application is the user.
          • Spivak 8y ago
            Applications that run under different user-supplied constraints (cpu, memory, syscalls, file access) doesn't really feel much like having different users. Things that are separate users by this definition: - Every VM running under my account. - Every docker container. - Every SELinux process/file type combination. - Every cgroup. - Each CPU ring. - Each call to pledge.
            • 8y ago
• qwerty456127 8y ago
  You are not alone. I miss this all the time. Nevrtheless I can see at least 3 important ways in which multi-user design is useful: 1. Constraining a guest user so they won't access anything they shouldn't - when a guest comes to you and asks to use you PC and you want to be nice and let them. 2. Constraining resident server programs so you won't get pwned. 3. Constraining nonfree apps (their installers especially) so they won't put/remove/modify anything outside user directory (Windows apps love to do this).
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  No, you are not. I've been yearning for such an OS for some time now, and have been putting a lot of thought into precisely what it is that is missing from modern computing that makes me feel like a "personal computer" doesn't exist anymore. I think John Ohno's article "Big and small computing" [0] managed to articulate it better than I could. So what I've been doing some research and planning and trying to find the shortest path from the garbage pile we have today to something reasonably like what I actually want, and doing the research needed to make that happen. Unfortunately there's quite a lot to be done and I lack the experience and skill set to do it all, currently, but it's something I really want to do. I wish I could find a community already engaged in the same goal. [0] https://hackernoon.com/big-and-small-computing-73dc49901b9a https://hackernoon.com/big-and-small-computing-73dc49901b9a