[oblio]

> when literally the only files that matter to me are in /home, which is a free-for-all?

> The home folder's read write is usually restricted to the user.

Yeah, and that is the point. All user's programs including curl, wget, the web browser, anything else that connects to the network run as the user, and all the user's programs, by default, have access to everything inside ${HOME}.

Most people don't really care if /bin gets obliterated, but they do care dearly when /home/joe/photos/annies-2nd-birthday gets wiped.

[skydhash]

Protecting a user from himself is hard. Protecting user from others is easy. Linux is influenced by unix and a lot of installations are servers. Where most programs run under their own accounts.

You can always have two user accounts: oblio and unsafe-oblio anf have a shared folder between the two for transferring files. Or invest into some backup software.

[TZubiri]

Just make another user bro. If you can't even create a user to run a program you distrust, the issue is not that windows doesn't provide sandboxes, it's that you don't use them

And no, it's not "a lot of work" it's the bare minimum

[oblio]

Yet 99% of the planet doesn't do "the bare minimum", bro.

We have supposedly all the smartest minds in the world working in tech and they haven't been able to create a simple, cheap, reliable cross platform solution for user data protection, backup and restore.

It's easier to blame users instead.

[bigstrat2003]

> It's easier to blame users instead.

Yes, because the users are in fact the problem. The options are either to trust the user to make decisions (and technically illiterate users will screw things up for themselves), or lock down the system so that the user isn't allowed to do anything the corporate overlord doesn't let them. There is no middle ground.

[oblio]

There is one where desktops are slowly being remade, which Windows and MacOS are failing at. Have application repositories, but open ones like Debian or Linux in general, so that application developers can publish and don't ask for a cut of every sale. Sandbox all new desktop applications over the years and publish long roadmaps until everything is sandboxed, say, in 2035.

Provide more education and guidance for users and more corporate controls.

If they would have really started to do this in 2005, we would have been there by now. Instead we get more UI toolkits and more UI refreshes and AI everywhere.

[Zenul_Abidin]

I rolled out a home-made backup script in Powershell - just a wrapper around wbadmin that backs up an entire system image and the a standard "Backup and Restore" backup on an external disk once I plugged it in.

I even signed it and everything.

[NetMageSCW]

The iPad and iPhone say “Hi!” - at least until the EU and other companies get done ruining them.

[oblio]

Yeah, yeah. It's not purely about installing apps. It's primarily about sandboxing them.

I always thought Americans were "nanny state this, nanny state that". Doesn't this also apply to huge state sized corporations mandating a cut of every app sold and forcing everyone to only install apps from them?

[dgxyz]

Backups FTW.