Will they ever learn and not be so arrogant ?
Why on earth do OS vendors believe that computer owners shouldn't be able to run THEIR stuff on THEIR computers and other devices ? That was once the purpose of an OS. Now we live in fear of the next update breaking our stuff or ever increasing lockdowns in the name of "Security" when it's really nothing of the sort. Just a desire to control what people do, and make money out of them.
MS tried a complete walled garden approach with the now completely defunct ARM based Surface tablet. As a former Acorn Archimedes/RiscOS games programmer (as well as lots of other platforms) I would have loved to do something with this machine, until I found one couldn't possibly do anything with it without "permission" from MS. Same with the fruity ARM based devices.
But ARM based Surface failed miserably, a lot of people complained and thought they'd been conned, by thinking they had "Windows" on that machine. I'm sure most of them are in a skip, or in someone's junk box nowadays.
Will Microsoft ever learn ? It seems not.
Also the only stable and reliable interface to Windows (if it is indeed that) is Win32. Everything else seems to get deprecated or abandoned before too long, and I wouldn't invest my time and effort into any other Microsoft runtime environment. UWP is a complete joke. It took Microsoft themselves ages to get this right. I had a Surface Pro 3 which lost its start menu, settings, and loads of the included UWP apps. No one had no idea what was happening except that it wasn't just happening to me. It was eventually fixed, but it was a miserable experience until that happened. All I got in the way of advice from MS surface support, was "reset your OS" only for it all to happen again Yeah right. Well it wouldn't have happened if they'd stuck with Win32. It turned out it happened because I refused to use a "Microsoft" account and stuck to my local login.
Here's a solution:
Let the owner optionally enrol a private/public key certificate on THEIR computer and password protect the private half. Then let the OWNER authorises each executable that can be run on the system with an easy screen popup when something gets run. There should be a way of enabling access for a period so things can be installed. Perhaps the installer can signal when it's done to turn off the authorisation.
To anyone espousing Linux:
Yes a good highly reliable alternative for some learned people, but not for the average user. Sharing data on a network for example was a nightmare on Ubuntu to set up. SUDO this that and the other, edit this config file and that one. If widespread adoption of Linux is desirable they MUST make the setup and maintenance of Linux as easy as the other OS targeted at the none technical user, and the Linux user interfaces more attractive.
I challenge them to do all of this.
Ubuntu desktop looks worse than windows 10 on a bad day really. I've never played with Mint, so I can't comment on that. But Linux is too geeky and hard to understand for average folk. Someone needs to write a suite of setup tools, and utilities so it can behave like the Mac or Windows and then we'll ALL go for it I'm sure!
Yeah, Linux could be great. It powers all the smartphones, Darwin powers the Macs.
Let's have something as usable as that, targeted at the home and average user, without the endemic control freakery, and a security system that empowers the user to create and run whatever they want, in all areas of the OS.
Computer OWNER - Installs and runs whatever he wants to.
Other users of OWNERS Computer - Limited to what OWNER wants on THEIR computer.
If I wasn't so old at sixty one, I'd be up for working on all this!