zlacker

>>rbanff+(OP)
Wow, talk about being out of touch with the real world. Developers, especially Linux developers, really need to give up on this whole "Desktop" operating system idea. It's not going to work. It is already dead. And I can hardly believe we are still using these ancient systems for many tasks even today. There is no future in WIMP, and people really need to stop developing these Windows clones already. It was lame 10 years ago. If you are still working on desktop OS clones today, you so are terribly out of touch with the real world there really is no hope for you or your product. Get over it.

Touch-based (and by extension, NUI-based) OS'es and mobile applications are the future. Windows always sucked. Mac OS always sucked. Every desktop OS ever built sucked because it is a horrible way to use a computer. Nobody ever really wanted to use these terrible desktop metaphor systems... they only ever did because they had to.

>>dj2ste+j4
I think you're missing the context here. This system is not about UI. It's not about desktop experience either. It's about making sure your email client is so separated from your $BUSINESS_APPLICATION, that exploiting one does not allow you to access anything on the other - and doing that without relying on handcrafted libvirt configs and hopefully without much processing overhead.

I guess the desktop environment was just a random choice of "this works, so just leave it in" from whatever distribution they started with.

>>virapt+v4
That already exists: it's called a web browser.

Granted, browsers aren't without their security holes, but then again, neither are operating systems. Given the amount of effort being put into browsers to make them secure (especially Chrome), my money's on that.

>>ericho+25
That's exactly why this system goes further. In a browser, it's usually enough to exploit the browser's chrome to get to other sites. Or exploit the browser's binary to get to other apps.

This system goes at least 2 layers deeper. System itself makes sure that each window has its own desktop environment and can't see others. Hardware takes care about the separation between security containers the apps are running in. Protection of the app itself is just the first line of defence and is not going away, so whatever sandboxing exists in the browser still applies.

They are also talking about protecting hardware sharing from being used to cross boundaries which is another layer of paranoia (not unwarranted)