I clicked into this hoping this would be about moving towards proper app isolation rather than make things look pretty stuff (bit of oversimplification).
I mean especially in the age of AI agents, two things are true, first, customizing your desktop, tiling manager, monitoring widgets, shortcut keys, hooking up hand gestures, eye tracking, foot pedals, whatever, to workflows is now so much easier and accessible to completely non-technical users, especially in open source desktop environments.
This is undoubtedly a good thing and many of the responses here are along the lines of 'I like to customize it like this' but I'd bet a lot here also know completely non-technical users who have setup their own weird ass workflows using excel and autohotkey or whatever just to get shit done.
The second thing that is true, is that increasingly we are handing control of apps to AI agents, or even just whole desktops, which is just greaaat (tm). but also incredibly risky since our desktop environments are built on 1970ish era unix multi-user mainframe system design, where one app you install has access to every single other app in the same user space, which is basically root, since you hold everything in one user login anyway. So all it takes is one supply chain attack, one malicious package take over, one zero-day prompt injection against a popular app in a certain segment and then your entire user profile and all your data is exfiltrated.
There are people working on this, Flatpack, Wayland, Fedora. But I think it needs a lot more attention. Android has got this model right for the most part despite the friction it sometimes introduces.
Also I would say this is not just about ai agents thing, but I don't want to install a desktop meme generator program (or pick your thing) and then have it be able to monitor the entire rest of my user profile. This problem existed before AI agents, its just maybe more relevant now.
I mean especially in the age of AI agents, two things are true, first, customizing your desktop, tiling manager, monitoring widgets, shortcut keys, hooking up hand gestures, eye tracking, foot pedals, whatever, to workflows is now so much easier and accessible to completely non-technical users, especially in open source desktop environments.
This is undoubtedly a good thing and many of the responses here are along the lines of 'I like to customize it like this' but I'd bet a lot here also know completely non-technical users who have setup their own weird ass workflows using excel and autohotkey or whatever just to get shit done.
The second thing that is true, is that increasingly we are handing control of apps to AI agents, or even just whole desktops, which is just greaaat (tm). but also incredibly risky since our desktop environments are built on 1970ish era unix multi-user mainframe system design, where one app you install has access to every single other app in the same user space, which is basically root, since you hold everything in one user login anyway. So all it takes is one supply chain attack, one malicious package take over, one zero-day prompt injection against a popular app in a certain segment and then your entire user profile and all your data is exfiltrated.
There are people working on this, Flatpack, Wayland, Fedora. But I think it needs a lot more attention. Android has got this model right for the most part despite the friction it sometimes introduces.
Also I would say this is not just about ai agents thing, but I don't want to install a desktop meme generator program (or pick your thing) and then have it be able to monitor the entire rest of my user profile. This problem existed before AI agents, its just maybe more relevant now.