Qubes is a good product while simultaneously being both the best and an objectively poor solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. That's how much of a mess

Qubes is a good product while simultaneously being both the best and an objectively poor solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. That's how much of a mess the situation is. Qubes is sandboxing at a machine level by putting every application set into it's own O/S. Is that in any way clean or ideal? Not at all. But it's necessary if you don't trust your own O/S not to have been compromised by the software running inside it. I get the arguments against centralised software distribution - it encourages monopolistic behaviour and removes user freedom - but it does at least make a problem of this nature fixable if you can enforce compliance to breaking changes at distribution time. I'd like to think a new layer could be added to Linux or BSD that would marshall this kind of compliance centrally without deliberately conflating payment into it, but I've no idea how you'd get widespread adoption of something like that even if you could organise to implement it. You'd also likely need to implement code-signing everywhere which was such a challenge in the past that (at least in the Linux kernel) it was abandoned. A similar model to how domain registration works for white-listing might make sense here, in that it's not centralised - but it's not fully decentralised either - and at some point there needs to be a process to onboard new authorities who everyone needs to trust, at which point it's a slippery slope to self-certification.