2009/11/8 Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com:
I expect that people will do utterly stupid things, there's no two ways around that, it's human nature. That being the case, I think there are still opportunities for providing a safe computing experience without compromising the user's convenience. Case in point: the sandbox used by the Chromium web browser. It provides a modicum of security without getting in the way. I can easily imagine classes of windows apps, say, games, fitting nicely into a sandboxed wine environment. Sure, getting the networking right would be a challenge, but for at least casual games, it ought to be quite doable. The key is to require no user choices -- just do the right thing by default. Then the user's level of education or computer skills don't matter.
You'd get good sandboxing running Wine apps as another user. Main problem then is integration with the user's desktop. Doable, but a nuisance.
- d.