If people don't get the opportunity to fuck up, you arrest their development. Stupid software users then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Users will become dumber than they ever were before, and therefore more and more reliant on software developers to do/make everything for them. In my cynical moments, I suspect this is all intentional... Imagine if the fast food industry were throwing their weight around to promote the idea that children should be kept out of kitchens.

I believe the same is the case with limited control over technology. Most users do not care to learn, and would opt to actively avoid the opportunity to learn if the associated danger was removed for them.

In my opinion the best option is to remain in the current state by default and have a more obscure 'power user' option that could be enabled within the OS itself.

I mean, I do it for a living and I'm glad I know.

But I don't really know how bridges, or electric guitars, or cars, or genetic engineering, or oil paintings work.

It's awfully gatekeeper-y to insist that computers should be these totally wide-open, unsafe spaces.

I mean it's almost exactly like saying people should know how to rebuild an engine if they want to drive a car.

It's certainly good to know how to rebuild an engine, but surely many people should be able to use cars without knowing that...

As a further point, drivers are (with edge case exceptions) not kept away or locked down from performing any work on their vehicle, yet in most cases they would still prefer to pass the responsibility on to a trusted professional.

Recently, I fixed a number of small (non-drivetrain) things on my car and I wish I knew more.

- Network access

- Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU)

- Sharing data to other software

- Consuming data from other software

- etc.

As we've seen, we wind up needing to turn a bunch of these on for most software, and while it's certainly better than giving them carte blanche over the entire system, a handful of these permissions are enough to work some skullduggery.

Most software does not "need" network access, it just ends up being used for telemetry, serving ads, and checking for updates you probably don't need anyway.

> Direct hardware access (such as games accessing the GPU)

"Direct", meaning they need a context handle and some shared memory to get composited by the OS. Still, I'm honestly not sure why this isn't a solved problem today. Why are GPUs not virtualizable the way CPUs are?

> - Sharing data to other software > - Consuming data from other software

Software can be grouped together and allowed to talk among eachother within a certain context without giving any given piece of it the ability to burn the world down.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that taking control away from users is a better solution.

I agree that users need full control. I also think a few decades of personal computing have shown us that the defaults should be pretty safe and therefore restrictive.

Users should have to jump through a hoop or two (perhaps as simple as `sudo enable-expert-mode` in a terminal, or some such) before being able to shoot themselves in the foot.

As a result, all users are imperiled.

I mean, even with an App Store, IE would have been pushed hard, just like Edge is now. And it still would have been a buggy mess, and people would have still been infected...

I can't believe I just defended Windows here...

I fixed hundreds, maybe thousands of machines infected with malware back in those days. Switching users to Firefox and a safe e-mail client nearly eliminated all of their issues.

Here's [1] over 1000 CVEs in Windows 10 alone, many of quite critical nature and not related to IE or OE.

Here's [2] another 1200+ for Windows 7.

Here's [3] 741 for the "back in the day" Windows XP.

[1] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p...

[2] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p...

[3] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p...

I wasn't a computer person back then. But I quickly learned about SMB file and printer sharing being wide open.

I think that's exactly what the vast majority of people advocating for sideloading are proposing. At least it's what I'd propose.