[haiku-development] Multi-user is a mistake
- From: John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2014 11:41:04 -0500
I've been thinking a bit about post R1 features and I see that there is a
clear motivation to eventually add multi-user capabilities to Haiku and I
feel that this is a mistake. Haiku should remain a single user OS.
Personal computers are and should be personal, that is, they should cater
to a single individual. Adding additional users adds additional complexity
which makes the entire system harder to use and more abstract.
Families that share a computer need not have multiple accounts. It's a
niche case which is better served through individual account services.
By not having multiple user accounts you don't have to worry about if an
application is available for a single user or all users on the system, all
applications are available.
Same goes for shared resources such as music.
By not having user accounts you are allowed to use the computer
anonymously, you don't have to first identify yourself, this is a really
important benefit.
What is needed is privilege separation ala sandboxing. Applications should
only be allows to read and write from specific locations such as their own
settings files. Applications should need to special privileges to write to
shared areas like adding and the like.
The problem of security is orthogonal to multi-user, one should not
influence the decision to utilize, or not utilize the other.
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