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I don't want this, I wouldn't use this. I guess I'm just not optimistic enough to see this work: Flatpak, snap, etc don't work as they just try to make the cur

I don't want this, I wouldn't use this. I guess I'm just not optimistic enough to see this work: Flatpak, snap, etc don't work as they just try to make the current desktop philosophy secure, without the application and the rest of the OS really being aware of it. Android and ios have been designed to offer native features for fine grained access control and isolation. For a desktop os, you need the same, from the ground up, and every app needs to be tailored to this. You'll start with a desert and tumbleweed. This will never work, because it's simply too late: The web. A Chromebook pretty much does all the isolation you want on a different level, and is enough for the vast majority of people. I know you can now list a thousand things you cannot do in a browser and whatnot, but consider that the folks here on HN are a very rare breed. And again, as you even said, for such a hypothetical sndboxing desktop os, user space needs to be rebuilt in large parts from scratch. Not in a hundred years. There so many things that are still lacking on the linux desktop today that this would at best be yet another experimental toy OS with no real world usability. For me it's simply two separate, physical machines, one for online banking and sensitive stuff, the other for dev work, games, goofing off, and one or two android devices for other random crap. That's my sandboxing.

kaba0 5y ago
It would be a hard change, especially with the die-hard love for C, but I don’t think that it would be impossible to make it possible, with a backward compatible escape hatch. Also, Linux user space is not famous for being binary backwards compatible, and everything being source available, I think with a clever abstraction it could potentially work.
pdimitar 5y ago
> And again, as you even said, for such a hypothetical sndboxing desktop os, user space needs to be rebuilt in large parts from scratch. Not in a hundred years. There so many things that are still lacking on the linux desktop today that this would at best be yet another experimental toy OS with no real world usability. From the several toe dips I did with Linux desktop over the years, 99.9% of all user-space GUI programs will not be missed by more than 5000 hardcore fans anyway. Rust, Zig, Nim, D -- all fine languages, and all gradually travel to having a proper UI toolkit (or solid bindings to the existing ones, more often). I happen to believe that when the solid foundation gets created we'll see an explosion of high-quality Linux desktop programs. But various problems with Qt and GTK are preventing it (licenses included)... for now.
- InfiniteRand 5y ago
  But this is the Linux desktop, if you're not getting paid to use it, and you're not ignoring it to do everything on the command line, you're probably a hard-core fan of some odd niche app
  - anoncake 5y ago
    Almost every application that supports Linux has been ported to other platforms. Linux is the one big platform no one is forced to use.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    That's true. It's also true you can make almost any desktop environment and theming with it which I dig quite a lot but never have time for. IMO desktop Linux has a future -- and I am saying this as a vocal critic of it. But there are some obstacles that haven't been overcome yet.

kaba0 5y ago

It would be a hard change, especially with the die-hard love for C, but I don’t think that it would be impossible to make it possible, with a backward compatible escape hatch. Also, Linux user space is not famous for being binary backwards compatible, and everything being source available, I think with a clever abstraction it could potentially work.

pdimitar 5y ago

> And again, as you even said, for such a hypothetical sndboxing desktop os, user space needs to be rebuilt in large parts from scratch. Not in a hundred years. There so many things that are still lacking on the linux desktop today that this would at best be yet another experimental toy OS with no real world usability. From the several toe dips I did with Linux desktop over the years, 99.9% of all user-space GUI programs will not be missed by more than 5000 hardcore fans anyway. Rust, Zig, Nim, D -- all fine languages, and all gradually travel to having a proper UI toolkit (or solid bindings to the existing ones, more often). I happen to believe that when the solid foundation gets created we'll see an explosion of high-quality Linux desktop programs. But various problems with Qt and GTK are preventing it (licenses included)... for now.

InfiniteRand 5y ago
But this is the Linux desktop, if you're not getting paid to use it, and you're not ignoring it to do everything on the command line, you're probably a hard-core fan of some odd niche app
- anoncake 5y ago
  Almost every application that supports Linux has been ported to other platforms. Linux is the one big platform no one is forced to use.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  That's true. It's also true you can make almost any desktop environment and theming with it which I dig quite a lot but never have time for. IMO desktop Linux has a future -- and I am saying this as a vocal critic of it. But there are some obstacles that haven't been overcome yet.