Disk encryption protects you from somebody who steals your switched-off laptop.

This discussion is about the permissions that applications get. Desktop Linuxes don't have such an permission system in place - "just run as root" with ultimate trust in the application is quite common. Sandboxing isn't a thing either.

Sandboxing is surely a thing, you just have to configure it.

And that is where things fail. Expect all users to setup sandboxing on their own ? Don't make a mistake ? And "disk encryption" is not a catch all solution to security. Otherwise every OS would be secure.

Just like Chromebooks are a market failure outside the US school system, because a large target of the world population requires more than a browser manager OS on their laptops.

Amount of Chromebooks on sale across European electronic consumer stores, less than 1%.

The 1% is left for when they occasionally pop up under "deal of the day", when the shop decides to test waters and is more than happy when it finally goes away after a couple of weeks on display.

Nice, don't reply to the point on security and shift goal posts. So you admit that "disk encryption" doesn't work ? Year of the Linux Desktop wohoooo. Also did you see Windows announcement about a cloud based OS :) sounds familiar ? But sure hate a Google product. It's the fad these days.

I did answer, but you weren't paying attention.

GNU/Linux security is better than ChromeOS because the updates are guaranteed for longer than six years, if one buys a laptop from someone like System76, or plenty of small Linux shops, it can be properly configured with encryption, LinuxSE, Flatpak/Snap/whatever.

Windows is a proper OS and its cloud offerings are not new.

Have a look at all the ancient Linux routers everywhere. They have all kinds of nasty security issues up to RCE. Linux and open source doesn't solve anything by itself. It must be brought to the customer -- without interaction.

Security must be the default. Automatic updates, sane default configuration. And a user interface that supports security.