The truth is that Gatekeeper should go the way of the devil.
It is my machine and I paid for it, why does the OS care about what I do with it? The only thing this leads to is making sure your customers grow into good little lemmings.
You can do whatever you want if you are a power user, the tools are there to get around Gatekeeper.
For everyone else it's probably sane to have it, works as a decent filter so someone not tech-savvy don't get hurt by installing malware disguised as an app, one would just need to state incredible features that almost any normal user would like to have, and make them click to install. Gatekeeper diminishes that risk by a lot unless you learn how to bypass it, which requires you having decent skills and probably wouldn't fall for the bullshit that malware apps try to bait people with.
So that you don't accidentally run malware. MacOS is not iOS, you can run unsigned code if you really want to, but it will make you jump through a few hoops.
How is this better than trying to eliminate the problem between the keyboard and the computer? The user won't learn if the computer handholds them through everything.
Because the vast majority of users have no interest in learning how to safely vet apps and just want to easily use their computers and not worry about malware.
Full stop. I still talk to people every working day who don't realize that rebooting a computer is actually a real troubleshooting step. They seem to think it's bunk tech support mumbo jumbo rather than a genuinely useful step. It's 2026 and they're still surprised when that works.
> They seem to think it's bunk tech support mumbo jumbo
It indeed is. It's a way of coping with systems that are fundamentally illegible and unpredictable. If you have full rights over your machine and you're not running extremely shoddy software, you should never have to reboot your computer to make an issue go away. And rebooting your computer often guarantees that you'll never actually understand whatever issue is plaguing you.
Encouraging people to reboot their computers is promoting a fundamentally superstitious mode of engagement with machines that are generally reliable and predictable, instead of approaching them in terms of cause and effect. At best, it's the tired point-and-click sysadmin's workaround for not knowing what their system is doing.
Maybe for overwhelmed IT departments running half-baked operating systems loaded to the gills with invasive and meddlesome corporate spyware suites so inherently complex and complicated in their interactions with each other that the system itself is rendered more or less incomprehensible (even to the people administering it), just asking users to reboot is the right play to write in the tech support playbook. Maybe it's got the right ROI for a geek reluctantly roped into giving free tech support for a relative. But it's absolutely mumbo-jumbo and a sign that the "troubleshooter" is probably either ill-equipped to understand what's going on or just not interested.
Sure, if you have full rights. I run my computer for weeks at a time without rebooting. However, at my employer, where there is very little control, it’s a different story.
About two weeks ago, some Adobe Acrobat update introduced a hang that results in “Acrobat won’t open.” Open Task Manager and there’s four to eight stuck processes. Kill them and it works again most of the time, but once in ten it simply doesn’t recover.
Adobe acknowledged the issue to someone on my team. There’s no need for me to understand further; telling the user that a reboot will solve it is prudent advice. It’s on Adobe to fix it. You made assumptions about the environment where I tell people to reboot without understanding the conditions and I have an immediate real world case demonstrating why your statements don’t apply.
The user also shouldn't need to potentially suffer massive financial impacts from not being good enough at using a computer... Even more if it's a problem that can be solved by the computer itself as it's done already.
It's like you are saying that potentially dangerous tools shouldn't have safety guards whenever possible, with little impact for the common use of the tool. Kinda absurd to think that way... If some advanced use-cases require safety guards to be removed that's when the user should be trained enough to know the risks.
People want to use a computer for their tasks, the whole motto of Apple was to make technology accessible to normal people without requiring them to be tech-savvy, what you want goes in complete opposition to that mission.
I really don't understand what the issue is? Gatekeeper is merely a warning that introduces a minimal friction if what are you trying to run is created by an entity that chose not to present itself. It only happens once per application, not per launch. I've spent more time reading this thread than I have removing quarantine flags in the last five years.
Apple has a lot to be criticized for but gatekeeper (and SIP) isn't that.
It's fine as long as both exist and third parties are not allowed to know which one you're running.
Otherwise, you have banks and MAFIAA and others off-loading their own security and compliance costs to users by flat out discriminating based on the status of the sandbox.
Exactly. We won't have "hardware integrity" and other such freedom-limiting factors going the way of the dodo anytime soon if we keep handing the organizations trying to estabilish those systems ourselves lubed and ready to go.
It's a bit slow for me, in my experience. Sometimes doesn't want to copy the image to the clipboard. Saving is also wonky. Really wish I just had sharex on Linux
...and then you look into what devices they are using and what they are ignoring that could have been resolved by tinkering.
My father-in-law has just had an issue where Xiaomi's camera app took up 95GB of space on his phone. Not the photos - just the camera app. Uninstalling updates for the app resolved the issue, all the space was magically back.
It is my machine and I paid for it, why does the OS care about what I do with it? The only thing this leads to is making sure your customers grow into good little lemmings.
reply