Nah, if a bank or some other civic entity wants to have a "secure agent" for transactions/communication with me, then they should be the ones providing that.
Much like I expect my employer to provide me hardware, and that hardware is used exclusively for work.
I shouldn't have to spend my own money on another device, nor should they be asserting their desires for control onto my own devices.
The issuing entity. They want a "secure device" to do business with me, then they get to issue said device.
Otherwise, they just get to be OK with offering me a website or letting me transact with them on my own device that's under my own control without stipulations like requiring attestation, or prohibiting root.
The point is, governments nor banks or other private entities, should be getting to dictate what can and cannot be done on someone's computing device.
They're happy to provide that. It's a called debit card that you take to an ATM machine.
It's been popular demand, not financial institutions, driving the change to “the smartphone can do everything, I don't want to take debit/credit cards with me everywhere.”
People don't want an additional card, or yubi key, or printed second factor, or whatever, to authenticate.
They want an app that uses a data connection, and a fingerprint to replace even needed a PIN. They tolerate a second channel: an SMS, if the app automatically reads it. That's as much inconvenience as the general public is willing to put up with.
They're starting to demand that this works offline for smaller spends. And they'll put up with a phone call as a 3rd factor for when they want to unblock a really high spend, like purchasing a car, but it can't happen all the time.
They want this to work reliably, even on holidays, all around the world. And they want the banks to cover losses if it all goes south.
Now try to design a system that covers the requirements people are demanding for, without trusting the terminal the people decided they want to access it from.
At least here in the UK for years if you opened a bank account, even a free one, you'd get a debit card + a device for generating secure keys for online and telephone banking. Like a standalone, battery powered device the size of a calculator.
Like....why can't we just go back to that? Banks were "fine"(doesn't mean happy) to shoulder the cost of these devices then.
You can still use them. It’s just mobile apps are better in almost every way. Maybe you should uninstall your mobile app and go back to using a device.
I hate that this is happening. I absolutely detest doing any kind of task other than pure content consumption and basic messaging from a smart phone.
Anything remotely more advanced than that, please let me use my computer and an app or website with, you know, an interface designed for more advanced operations.
Trying to do anything on a smartphone/touchscreen only device is nothing but an effort in pure frustration for me.
> 99% of these devices need is simply a way to configure them to connect to a different server, when the manufacturer inevitably turns their own server down (usually) bricking devices.
The same can be said about a lot of games, and should be the case with them as well. Big MMOs for example. See the plethora of WoW private servers as an example of how it can be done.
I think the stop killing games initiative in the EU was pushing for it but not sure how far they've gotten, but like with hardware, once a game studio no longer wants to run the servers for their game, they should be forced to turn it over to the community so the players can continue playing long after the studio is gone.
Bose's brand is built on audio quality. There is close to little negative impact open sourcing the API (server) in this case will bring to their brand.
For a game, open sourcing the server generally means anyone can basically mess it up and with the internet make it available to everyone to see. Then the responsibility is on the developer to protect their "brand".
The plethora of WoW private servers is not a good example. These are from individuals, or groups of people who willfully reverse engineered it on their own. This is different from a company expressly permissing and implicitly giving a grant on allowing a similar product to exist - the difference is that one gives credibility, which the other does not.
> except for the fact that it is aesthetically more "modern" to its detriment.
And also much, much slower.
The old context menu is nearly instant even when stuffed with extensions. When the new one is full of extensions, it takes full seconds to load the entire menu. You get a partial load, then the extensions pop in (and of course pushes elements down/up so now you misclick).
I don't even know how anyone could experience it in testing and allow it to go live in the state that its in. Its like no one even looked at it.
Windows 10/11 UX is very slow in general. Combined with Intel mobile CPUs of the last few years running much hotter compared to Apple M models makes for terrible laptops. Lots of fan noise with a sluggish UI doesn't feel anywhere near a Macbook Air, even an M1. While full power raw CPU performance may actually be very close and the Intel based laptops typically cheaper.
Drawing gray rectangles is a very resource intensive operation. It is a wonder how a Pentium was able to draw also a 3D border around the rectangle.
There were some sick people who, in 4 Megs of RAM were also letting you choose colors while presenting a Win10/11 interface (Apollo) but those were some heretics.
Except we are at a point now where you almost do have to sell on Steam. If you aren't already huge, you aren't going to gain much traction, if any at all, for your game outside of Steam.
I remember when Steam launched, it was rightfully met with hostility. Somehow Valve managed to completely win over gamers, and they do good work, but lets not forget that they are quickly approaching monopoly status. Just because someone could sell on some other store doesn't mean it would be profitable to do so because of Steam's userbase.
> When developing for Linux becomes more and more attractive this might change.
If one (or maybe two) OSes win, then sure. The problem is there is no "develop for Linux" unless you are writing for the kernel.
Each distro is a standalone OS. It can have any variety of userland. You don't develop "for Linux" so much as you develop "for Ubuntu" or "for Fedora" or "for Android" etc.
There's always appimages or flatpaks that could fill that cross-distro gap, though I suspect a lot of development work would need to be done to get that to a point where either of those are streamlined enough to work in the phone ecosystem.
I feel I just need to run a slightly too large LLM with too much context on a MBP, and it's enough to slow it down irreparably until it suddenly hard resets. Maybe the memory pressure it does that at is much higher though compared to Linux?
Linux DEs still can't match the accessibility features alone.
yeah, there's layers and layers of progressively older UIs layered around the OS, but most of it makes sense, is laid out sanely, and is relatively consistent with other dialogs.
macOS beats it, but its still better in a lot of ways over the big Linux DEs.
Start menu in the middle of the screen that takes a couple seconds to even load (because it is implemented in React horribly enought to be this slow) only to show adds next to everything is perfect user experience.
Every other button triggering Copilots assures even better UX goodness.
Windows will remain as the default "enterprise desktop." It'll effectively become just another piece of business software, like an ERP.
Gamers, devs, enthusiasts will end up on Linux and/or SteamOS via Valve hardware, creatives and personal users that still use a computer instead of their phone or tablet will land in Apple land.
With the massive adoption of web apps in Enterprise I have seen I would expect Windows to become irelevant or even a liability in business use as well.
Still, some sort of OS is required to run that browser that renders the websites, and some team needs to manage a fleet of those computers running that OS. And that's where Microsoft will sit, since they're unable to build good consumer products, they'll eventually start focusing exclusively on businesses and enterprises.
If you just need something that runs a browser, can't you do that with something like Chrome OS/MacOS/RHEL Workstation/whatever SUSE has for workstation users ? :)
One of the things Windows did right, IMO. I hate that elevation prompts on macOS and most linux desktops are indistinguishable from any other window.
It's not just visual either. The secure desktop is in protected memory, and no other process can access it. Only NTAUTHORITY\System can initiate showing it and interact with it any way, no other process can.
You can also configure it to require you to press CTRL+ALT+DEL on the UAC prompt to be able to interact with it and enter credentials as another safeguard against spoofing.
I'm not even sure if Wayland supports doing something like that.
Much like I expect my employer to provide me hardware, and that hardware is used exclusively for work.
I shouldn't have to spend my own money on another device, nor should they be asserting their desires for control onto my own devices.