4 ms·

Everything you said is correct. But, there are surely cases where even though rewriting everything from scratch almost never works, the status quo doesn't work

Everything you said is correct. But, there are surely cases where even though rewriting everything from scratch almost never works, the status quo doesn't work either. I'm afraid that's where the Linux desktop is today. Linux as a platform actually sucks for running "untrusted" software. And "untrusted" doesn't just mean proprietary games. It also just means "can I please run the alpha version of this cool open source project without being afraid that it'll fuck up my whole home directory?" Android does a hacky thing where each program is its own "user". But then, having multiple (human) users is confusing (I don't know how Android does this, actually). I don't know if Wayland will succeed. In fact, I'm rather pessimistic about it. But I'm also pessimistic about desktop Linux "succeeding" (staying reasonably useful even to nerds) if Wayland doesn't.

GekkePrutser 6y ago
Android does a thing where it has its own display stack and very strict sandboxing so X11 isn't really a thing :) And for the sandboxing it uses SELinux which is available on desktop as well. It's just a royal PITA to configure. This is why many people don't bother with it. But in a highly restricted environment like a smartphone it's a lot easier. I wouldn't call that a 'hacky' thing, it's just using it in a very different environment.
- ragnese 6y ago
  The Android thing was a bit of a tangent. I did know that it doesn't use X. The point was intended to be that Linux is becoming more and more lacking as a personal computing platform, relative to the gains elsewhere in the space. The display server is one part of that- the entire user/group permission model is another part. The part of Android that is "hacky" is using a separate user for every app. That's obviously not what the Linux/Unix guys had in mind for the user mechanism, thus it's a "hack". It's not necessarily a bad thing and it's totally hidden from the UX of your typical Android user, so it's fine. Just interesting.
- rkangel 6y ago
  > And for the sandboxing it uses SELinux which is available on desktop as well I used to think that, and then I started using Fedora. They have put a lot of effort into their SeLinux policies. I do all sorts of things with my workstation and very rarely have to care. In the last 6 months the only thing I have had to do is add ":z" to a bind mount running a podman container so that labelling happened correctly.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Android does a thing where it has its own display stack and very strict sandboxing so X11 isn't really a thing :) And for the sandboxing it uses SELinux which is available on desktop as well. It's just a royal PITA to configure. This is why many people don't bother with it. But in a highly restricted environment like a smartphone it's a lot easier. I wouldn't call that a 'hacky' thing, it's just using it in a very different environment.

ragnese 6y ago
The Android thing was a bit of a tangent. I did know that it doesn't use X. The point was intended to be that Linux is becoming more and more lacking as a personal computing platform, relative to the gains elsewhere in the space. The display server is one part of that- the entire user/group permission model is another part. The part of Android that is "hacky" is using a separate user for every app. That's obviously not what the Linux/Unix guys had in mind for the user mechanism, thus it's a "hack". It's not necessarily a bad thing and it's totally hidden from the UX of your typical Android user, so it's fine. Just interesting.
rkangel 6y ago
> And for the sandboxing it uses SELinux which is available on desktop as well I used to think that, and then I started using Fedora. They have put a lot of effort into their SeLinux policies. I do all sorts of things with my workstation and very rarely have to care. In the last 6 months the only thing I have had to do is add ":z" to a bind mount running a podman container so that labelling happened correctly.