Comment on Is Matrix cooked?
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks agoApp-specific file-acess permissions are on MacOS out of the box as a configurable setting for all applications (in the system settings menu), and I’m pretty sure Windows 10/11 has something similar in its settings menu as well.
I don’t know about macos, but I doubt that it applies to software tgat was obtained outside of their app store.
on windows however, those settings only apply to UWP apps. not .exe and .bat and .msi and .ps programs, but .appx packages that you can install from the Microsoft Store. and installing something from the Microsoft Store does not mean that it’ll be sandboxed, lots of regular .exe programare also distributed there.
Also, if we’re being pedantic, this is also a setting on both Android and iOS, with Android displaying the option to change access pretty much every time you pick out a file.
those are mobile operating systems, they have been designed with this in mind from the beginning. General purpose desktop computers are very different though, for better or worse. and, as I know, desktop computer users are still not a small minority
Zangoose@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Didn’t know it only applied to UWP apps on Windows. That does seem like a pretty big problem then.
I don’t still have a Mac readily available to test with but afaik it is any application that uses Apple’s packaging format. It could also be that it needs to be in the “Applications” folder, but I’m almost certain it isn’t an App Store exclusive feature.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
it is mostly for compatibility reasons. no win32 programs are equipped to handle such granular permissions and sandboxing, they are all made with the assumption that they have access to whatever they need (other than other users’ resources and things that require elevation). if Microsoft would have made that limitation to every kind of software, that Windows version would have probably been a failure in popularity because lots of software would have broken. I think S editions of windows is how they tried to go in that direction, with a more drastic way of simply just dropping support for 3rd party win32 programs.
ok, so if you run linux or windows utils in a compatibility layer, they still have less of a limited access? by which I mean graphical utilities. just tried with firefox, for macos it wanted to give me an .iso file (???)
if so, it seems apple is doing roughly the same as microsoft with uwp and the appx format, and linux with flatpak: it’s a choice for the user