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Moving PCs to a more mobile-like environment, where apps are always sandboxed and all permissions are explicit, sounds so tempting. But then you realize that manufacturers will always cross the line: MS and Apple apps get special privileges, the bootloader will be permanently locked, and you'll eat your DRM because you have no other choice.
It's always worth emphasizing imo that technological prophylactics like mobile-style sandboxing are redundant on operating system distributions whose social processes of development take responsibility for things like this (auto-updating, startup behavior, default app associations, file type associations, etc.) away from apps and centralize it under the control of the user via the OS' built-in config tools.
To be more explicit: free software distros generally lack software that behaves this way, and often actively patch such behavior out of ill-behaved cross-platform applications (who also sometimes lack it themselves, in builds targeting free operating systems). The problem is, as you note in your second paragraph, just as much that we're getting our software from untrustworthy distributors as it is that our desktop operating systems do too little to protect us from untrustworthy software. In some cases, the problem is rather that our software distributors have too little capacity to intervene, both for technical reasons (e.g., they don't have the damn source code) and social/economic ones (e.g., the model is to accept as much software as possible rather than to include a piece of software only after it is clear that there is capacity to scrutinize it, sanitize it, and maintain a downstream package of it).
You can avoid 99.999% of this kind of crap just by running a free software base system and avoiding proprietary software. Better app sandboxing is great! We should demand it and pursue it in whatever ways we can. But installing software directly from unscrupulous sources and counting on sandboxing to prevent abuse is also an intervention at the least effective stage. Relying on a safer social process of distributing software goes way further, as does keeping shitty software off our systems in the first place! These should be the approaches of first resort.
It's always worth emphasizing imo that technological prophylactics like mobile-style sandboxing are redundant on operating system distributions whose social processes of development take responsibility for things like this (auto-updating, startup behavior, default app associations, file type associations, etc.) away from apps and centralize it under the control of the user via the OS' built-in config tools.
To be more explicit: free software distros generally lack software that behaves this way, and often actively patch such behavior out of ill-behaved cross-platform applications (who also sometimes lack it themselves, in builds targeting free operating systems). The problem is, as you note in your second paragraph, just as much that we're getting our software from untrustworthy distributors as it is that our desktop operating systems do too little to protect us from untrustworthy software. In some cases, the problem is rather that our software distributors have too little capacity to intervene, both for technical reasons (e.g., they don't have the damn source code) and social/economic ones (e.g., the model is to accept as much software as possible rather than to include a piece of software only after it is clear that there is capacity to scrutinize it, sanitize it, and maintain a downstream package of it).
You can avoid 99.999% of this kind of crap just by running a free software base system and avoiding proprietary software. Better app sandboxing is great! We should demand it and pursue it in whatever ways we can. But installing software directly from unscrupulous sources and counting on sandboxing to prevent abuse is also an intervention at the least effective stage. Relying on a safer social process of distributing software goes way further, as does keeping shitty software off our systems in the first place! These should be the approaches of first resort.