alt Hacker NewsI think I disagree. If iOS or Android added robust support for external monitors, external keyboards and pointing devices, I'd probably switch to it to get the increased resistance against attacks.
If I could continue to run Emacs, e.g., in a VM like WSL2 or Crostini, I'd probably switch right away. If not, it would take me a year or 2 to transition to a replacement before I switch (and, no, that replacement would not need to be able to run software written in Emacs Lisp: I'd be happy to replace, rewrite or walk away from any functionality I currently get from code written in Emacs Lisp).
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> If iOS or Android added robust support for external monitors, external keyboards and pointing devices, I'd probably switch to it to get the increased resistance against attacks.
They basically do now?
On iOS I've never seen a BT keyboard not pair and I've never had problems with external monitors. Sometimes getting the right dongle so it plugs in is the bigger problem, but iPads have been USB-C for a while now, making it pretty much a non-issue, whenever I've tried.
I haven't tried with Android in a while, but I'd be surprised if it's much different than iOS at this point in time.
Android does have support for external keyboards and I know mice work but not the totality of pointing devices. There was a desktop experience with Samsung's DeX, complete with floating windows, but the experience was severely broken due to lackluster app support and clashing design priorities between touch and mouse.
Thing is that Android is probably no more secure than a standard desktop experience specifically due to the very uncontained Play Store, the prevalence of sideloading apps and rooting doesn't really help at all.
I use Linux, I would not switch to Android, but I agree the Linux userland should take sandboxing much more seriously. Things like Firejail show it can be done without much friction for the user.
The current model, where executables can access any user file or resource, needs to go. We haven't learned anything from e.g. compromised pip packages that stole ssh keys.