There’s bits and pieces of this in place with immutable distros, Wayland, and Flatpak but notable holes remain. The biggest one is that sandboxing is tied to the package format which I think is a mistake. Sandboxing and access permissions should be a system-level thing so even arbitrary binaries can’t easily slip through the cracks.

This wouldn’t fix the problem entirely, but it’d greatly limit the blast radius and make users of the distribution a less juicy target.

While imperative retain mode frameworks are technically possible in Rust, my understanding is that there’s a level of unavoidable ceremony and syntax ugliness (unless safety is discarded, which defeats the point of using Rust).

I wish there were more memory safe compiled languages that focused on ergonomics for cases like this.

For example, there might be layers for “system” (core components), “environment” (display manager, DE, etc), and “user”, each of which are maintained fully separately so they can’t ever step on each others’ toes and break things. Yes, it means there will be some redundancy but for all the trouble and complexity it’s saving I think it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.

The pendulum is overdue for swinging back the other way, but I don’t know who or what has both the capability and will to give it the push needed to send it on its way back.

Interoperability is not free. One of the trades it brings is a notably lowered ceiling in terms of tightness and capabilities, and this persists no matter how many man-hours are poured into engineering the systems that enable it.

The Linux desktop is a great example of this at play. While it's technically worked for decades at this point, it's been a constant struggle to make it a high quality, thoroughly polished experience end to end and that's partly thanks to the unavoidable friction and gaps between layers that comes with interoperability and tens of involved parties.

They basically make it an existential risk to build your success on anything nicely and neatly tightly vertically integrated. Everything must be dragged down to mediocrity by the unavoidable slippage between mandated abstraction layers and avoidance of features that can’t be easily or safely generalized.

It’s conflicting. Is Apple abusing its role in some cases, such as the App Store, and in need of some reigning in? Sure, but some of this goes too far and essentially requires them to strip their products of a portion of their appeal.

Even more frustrating is that nobody seems to be willing to discuss the issue with any level of nuance. It’s nearly all binary EU good/Apple bad or the reverse.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if next year they dissolve the iPhone/iPad distinction on the App Store altogether and maybe even remove the Catalyst toggle on the Mac App Store. If you make an iOS app, it’s also a full fledged iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS app too.

I certainly wouldn’t mind. On my Mac there are some needlessly heavy electron apps I’d swap out for their iOS counterparts in a heartbeat if that were possible, as well as some games that would run fine on macOS but their devs don’t tick the checkbox for unclear reasons.

I don’t think I’ve seen a single category of UX fail as hard and as often as auth screens do. It’s like at some point after 2015-2017 developers were struck with mass amnesia and forgot how to build decent login UIs.

It's too bad we can't mix and match parts of releases as desired. If I could have OS X 10.9 Mavericks (last Aqua release) with 10.6 Spaces and modern macOS integration features (Continuity, etc) I'd be in heaven.

If I'm not mistaken, to keep native titles running, they need to continue to haul around x86 versions of the majority of the system's libraries and frameworks, in which case there's little reason to not continue supporting Rosetta 2 as a whole since the delta between the two library/framework sets is minimal.

To keep games in WINE/CrossOver/etc working all they need to keep around is the x86 translation layer and maybe the x86 slice of OpenGL. Everything else x86 related can be deleted.

This way one’s housing costs feel like a bargain and savings (including repair reserves) quickly rack up unless the individual in question has serious problems holding onto money.

The main one for me is the inherent precariousness that comes with renting. You don’t know how much longer you’re going to be able to stay in your apartment, whether that be due to rent hikes or the landlord deciding that they want to give the apartment to their nephew or any number of other things. The constant low level stress of knowing that you might need to go through the hell of apartment hunting and moving annually is awful.

It’s been much nicer to have a mortgage with more or less locked in monthly payment, even with the maintenance costs that come with the territory. It’s more predictable and frees up mental bandwidth for other things.