Well yes, sandboxing should be the goal! Installing Steam from Flathub is a good first step on desktop machines. But as long as games require anti-cheat software at the kernel level, I'll keep a Windows partition around to sandbox the gaming world as a whole.
I agree that the discussion in this thread does not lead anywhere, and I regret scrolling down all the way down here.
But being an "information libertarian" was part of the hacker spirit for me, to borrow a word from the sibling poster. I find it useful to see these headlines on HN to keep track of where tech companies stand. A recruiter tried to get me into an eBay subsidiary just a month ago! Glad I didn't have time.
I think this depends on whether other manufacturers go that route. Apple would rather have their own Watch cannibalize iPhone sales than some Android Wear gadget.
> With a retina monitor, it's a great combination.
Sadly, the Retina monitor segment is a complete failure. Several 5K screens came out in 2015, along with the 27" Retina iMac, ... and then the market died off. The UltraFine 5K is finally available again, but it's being sold at 2015 prices (1400€ here). At that point you might as well get an iMac with eight cores, a dedicated GPU, and a semi-replaceable hard drive instead of the Mini.
In an ideal world, we'd have 8K ultrawide Retina displays by now. Sigh...
> maybe the difference is that we install Windows 10 Pro whereas the author is a Windows 10 Home user
No, every installation of Windows 10 Pro I've seen had a start menu that was mostly ads (links to Candy Crush, Spotify, Office etc.) - I've also had the OS nag me about giving Edge a second chance.
This is in Germany, in case the region matters, and I always deny all spyware as far as possible using the GUI.
Your posting really gets to my core frustration with our Western political establishment: We have "rational", "moderate" politicians like Hillary, Biden, Merkel, or the late John McCain, who were in favor of the illegal attack on Iraq, well knowing that civilians would die, and that the area would be destabilized (hello IS).
But because the US didn't attack Iraq based on a protected class like race, and because the Geneva conventions exist, everything is magically okay. No reason to deplatform these heroes of bipartisan politics.
I worry about the end of radical free speech on the internet precisely because I feel deeply disconnected from "mainstream morality". As internet censorship progresses, I'm sure I'll be kicked out before any of the high-status war criminals.
(I'm referring to the 2003 Iraq war because I still remember who supported it, but I assume the handling of Vietnam was similar in its time.)
Not only Linux. Many people praise Apple for its radical "game changers", but I mostly use macOS because they haven't broken my workflows or muscle memory in the last thirteen years. It's a miracle in the world of commercial software, and it probably won't last as long as XFCE.
> I liked the iOS redesign immediately. Now we're all so used to it, and now looking back iOS 6 looks like a janky toy, but most people hated iOS 7+.
These two sentiments are not necessarily incompatible. iOS 7 absolutely made iOS 6 look old and clunky, and I could never go back. But I also still actively hate the pure-white world of iOS 7 seven years later, and don't get me started on the Safari icon. It'll be curious to see how things evolve in the post-Ive world.
I wonder if the opposite effect also exists: a solid redesign that also lifts up the previous version in hindsight.
MacBook models until around 2009 had a physical button at the bottom of their trackpads. Imagine that it's still there -- use your thumb to click, and your fingers for everything else. I'm pretty sure that's what Apple intended users to do (until they made tap-to-click the default recently).
If the burden for authentication is on the developers anyway, then code-signing shouldn't require a 99€/year subscription. 99€ is a sum that doesn't help Apple, doesn't hinder criminals, but causes headaches for open-source projects and casual developers.
I'm a big fan of desktop sandboxing, so thanks for the hard work. I dreaded running the unsandboxed Office:mac 2011 with its constant stream of "critical" security updates. That was definitely my worst experience using native apps.
I think I would prefer a security model were you could just download and start any .app, but upon first opening it, a dialog would inform you about its code-signing author and the permissions that the app has (with striking red/green color coding). Because right now, there is no way to tell which apps even use sandboxing without opening Activity Monitor, and there is no incentive for non-App-Store-apps to use sandboxing. (There is a dialog when opening a downloaded app for the first time, but it's grey and boring and not helpful at all.)
Well yes, sandboxing should be the goal! Installing Steam from Flathub is a good first step on desktop machines. But as long as games require anti-cheat software at the kernel level, I'll keep a Windows partition around to sandbox the gaming world as a whole.