40 years ago people did not care about malicous applications, nor did they care about jank, nor did they have the hindsights that we do know. Those API only still exist because of backwards compatibility.
Yeah, I find the creep of web app security mentality into the desktop to be a disaster. I want to be able to easily snoop on and control my GUI and I absolutely don’t want some display system to decide it knows better than me about this sort of thing.
> That don't mean that every random program needs to be able to. If a program is to be able to snoop, it needs to explicitly given the ability to do so.
I strongly disagree with this, this is how you get inconsistent, annoying computing experiences
I'd perhaps say that security can be a good idea, but it needs to be done well for it to be so. And not at all implementing a potentially-abusable feature, while counting as "secure", is absolutely not doing it well.
I think it's coming from developers with proprietary backgrounds who want to normalize the running of untrusted proprietary software on the Linux desktop, probably from some appstore with abysmal quality standards like Android and iOS. Contrast this mentality with sticking to Free software you downloaded from the official Debian repos.. why do I need to be protected against that software? I don't. These mobile-like desktop protection schemes are designed to facilitate mobile-like software consumption habits. Fuck all of that!
Even if you are someone who wrote their whole user space from scratch and don't use the internet or open any files made by others, you are not representative of the larger userbase. A lot of people download random software or libraries that could be malware or even just buggy (eg. The time Steam unintentionally deleted user files). These people want to gain utility from all of this software without having to worry about the software being able to do bad things.
In other words you want to facilitate the bad user habits of Windows, iOS, Android, etc on the Linux desktop. Why do you even want to use the Linux desktop in the first place if you prefer those systems? Stick to what suits you instead of trying to assimilate the niche holdout systems like some sort desktop borg.
>you want to facilitate the bad user habits of Windows, iOS, Android, etc on the Linux desktop
They are not bad user habits. They are only bad if the system is poorly designed. Unfortunately, the Linux desktop was poorly designed and the community is taking their sweet time to fix it.
>Why do you even want to use the Linux desktop in the first place if you prefer those systems?
It's just what I am used to using. I ackowledge the security of my computer sucks and I could be easily pwned at any time.
>trying to assimilate the niche holdout systems like some sort desktop borg.
I want the Linux desktop to be viable to use. Having competitive security compared to other operating systems is important. People shouldn't have to worry that using a Linux desktop will mean that a bad program can steal all of their accounts or delete all the files they have been working on. These type of things are preventable by the system and just blaming people that they should have known that what they downloaded was malware even if it is not at all obvious.
That all sounds like a better case for sandboxing our data rather than sandboxing our applications. The application-centrism is an iOS-ism (and now a Mac-ism, but I repeat myself) designed to facilitate Apple’s economic model where they are the sole gatekeeper of what a computer is allowed to do. People blindly copy that model into the Free Software world because Apple are Very Rich and so everything they do is automatically a good idea.
Maliciousness like wanting to open a window at a given location? That's seriously bad behavior and I hope the offenders will be stopped promptly and prosecuted. I didn't think evil like this existed in the world.
No, maliciousness like having a window move itself high enough that the close button is off screen or malicousness like the window dancing around, potentially causing other windows to also be noted around as the window manager responds. Yes, these can be somewhat mitigated by the window manager but the fact that every window manager will need to think carefully about the security of this hints that the design of the protocol is exposing a bad abstraction or interface.
