I think it’s a great argument for some combo of immutable system files, installation of packages as user-local by default (making elevated manager privileges unnecessary), and components and programs being given as little privilege as possible by default.
There’s bits and pieces of this in place with immutable distros, Wayland, and Flatpak but notable holes remain. The biggest one is that sandboxing is tied to the package format which I think is a mistake. Sandboxing and access permissions should be a system-level thing so even arbitrary binaries can’t easily slip through the cracks.
This wouldn’t fix the problem entirely, but it’d greatly limit the blast radius and make users of the distribution a less juicy target.
There’s bits and pieces of this in place with immutable distros, Wayland, and Flatpak but notable holes remain. The biggest one is that sandboxing is tied to the package format which I think is a mistake. Sandboxing and access permissions should be a system-level thing so even arbitrary binaries can’t easily slip through the cracks.
This wouldn’t fix the problem entirely, but it’d greatly limit the blast radius and make users of the distribution a less juicy target.