We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

It doesn't work. Everything from banks to Netflix and others are slowly edging out anything where they can't fully verify the chain of control to an entity they can have a legal or contractual relationship with. To be clear, this is fundamental, not incidental. You can't run your own operating system because it's not in Netflix's financial interest for you to do so. Or your banks, or your government. They all benefit from you not having control, so you can't.

This is why it's so important to defend the real principles here not just the technical artefacts of them. Netflix shouldn't be able to insist on a particular type of DRM for me to receive their service. Governments shouldn't be able to prevent me from end to end encrypting things. I should be able to opt into all this if I want more security, but it can't be mandatory. However all of these things are not technical, they are principles and rights that we have to argue for.

The reason is that the desktop PC security model is deeply flawed. In modern desktop operating systems, we protect user A from user B. But any program running on my computer is - for some reason - completely trusted with my data. Any program I run is allowed to silently edit, delete or steal anything I own. Unless you install special software, you can't even tell if any of this is happening. This makes every transitive dependency of every program on your computer a potential attack vector.

I want computers to be hackable. But I don't also want my computer to be able to be hacked so easily. Right now, I have to choose between doing banking on my (maybe - hopefully - safe) computer. Or doing banking on my definitely safe iphone. What a horrible choice.

Personally I think we need to start making computers that provide the best of both worlds. I want much more control over what code can do on my computer. I also want programs to be able to run in a safe, sandboxed way. But I should be the one in charge of that sandbox. Not Google. Definitely not Apple. But there's currently no desktop environment that provides that ability.

I think the argument against locked down computers (like iphones and androids) would be a lot stronger if linux & friends provided a real alternative that was both safe and secure. If big companies are the only ones which provide a safe computing experience, we're asking for trouble.

Putting aside the philosophical issues, that statement isn't true for a few years now. It's not well known, even in very technical circles like HN, but macOS actually sandboxes every app:

• All apps from outside the app store are always sandboxed to a lesser degree, even if they are old and don't opt-in.

• All apps from outside the app store may opt in to stricter sandboxing for security hardening purposes.

• All apps from the app store are forced to opt-in, must declare their permissions in a fine grained way, and Apple reviews them to make sure they make sense.

To see this is true try downloading a terminal emulator you haven't used before, and then use it to navigate into your Downloads, Photos, Documents etc folders and run "ls". You'll get a permission prompt from the OS telling you the app is requesting access to that folder. If you click deny, ls will return a permission error.

Now try using vim to edit the Info.plist file of something in /Applications. ls will tell you that you have UNIX write permissions, but you'll find you can't actually edit the file. The kernel blocks apps from tampering with each other's files.

Finally, go into the settings and privacy/security area. You can now enable full disk access for the terminal emulator, or a finer grained permission like managing apps. Restart the terminal and permissions work like you'd expect for UNIX again.

Note that you won't see any permission popup in a GUI app if you open the file via the file picker dialog box. That's because the dialog box is a "powerbox" controlled by the OS, so the act of picking the file grants the app permission implicitly. Same for drag and drop, opening via the finder, etc. The permission prompt only appears when an app directly uses syscalls to open a file without some OS-controlled GUI interaction taking place.

So, if you want a desktop OS with a strong sandbox that you actually control, and which has good usability, and a high level of security too, then you should be using macOS. It's the only OS that has managed this transition to all-sandboxed-all-the-time.