On 28.02.2011 21:13, Sean Collins wrote:
Axel Dörfler wrote:Sean Collins <SMC.Collins@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:Honestly this could easily be leveraged by the existing boot loader very simply. If the drive manager application had some more functionality. you could control each drives access from a simple run time loader that is used for multi boot now.Security is not really an aspect of multi-user capability, it's an aspect of the operating system itself; it doesn't help you at all when you lose your data because of some sort of malware, but the other user on the machine did not. What really helps you if you don't lose your data in the first place. In any case, a multi-boot solution to multi-user is a very poor and powerless implementation of multi-user. Multi-user also means to be able to have more than one concurrent user, not just to share one computer in a round robin fashion.I see your point, but if not to protect data, then what other real purpose exists behind a desktop operating system with a multi user environment ?
[...]Look, it is slightly frustrating when you keep repeating the same questions which have been answered multiple times already, including in my very first reply to your very first mail. In that mail, I have presented a use-case. I am going to repeat it one more time:
My girlfriend has a Mac. It is the only one in our house hold. I have an account on that Mac, with my own settings and installed software, mostly development tools. In recent times, I have often needed to test the multi-platform software which I am developing, on the Mac. The Mac is usually never restarted, it just keeps on running and running and we only use the suspend feature when it is not used. So, given these circumstances, it is very, very convenient, to be able to switch into my (already running, Eclipse, Terminal open and all) user account, quickly do some tests, and switch back to my girlfriends account.
That is what I personally want/need multi-user for. All the information about your multi-user experience is pretty useless to me since it does not address my argument. All I am interested in is how your multi-partition approach would work as well as what I am doing on that Mac. I can't imagine it *can* even work that way. The only way would be if there were multiple VMs running *concurrently* and I can switch between them (maybe one VM is playing music which shall continue). That approach introduces a lot of overhead and sucking up of resources, even if the kernel supports finding and reusing the same memory pages across the VMs. It just isn't as flexible. And please note: I don't care about security in this context. So please stop arguing in that direction.
Best regards, -Stephan
