Update

An update to my previous post: I did use nvidia-settings, but eventually I decided to eschew graphical tools for the power of manually editing the xorg.conf configuration file. So now my xorg.conf is clean and human-readable, with lots of comments, and I've resolved not to use nvidia-settings or dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg anymore.

Dual booting, multiple monitors, desktop compositing

On my laptop, I'm dual booting between Windows Vista and Ubuntu 7.04. I've been using multiple monitors for about a month on Vista, where they've worked fine. Up till now, I hadn't tried setting up multiple monitors on Ubuntu, but I just did using the very convenient graphical tool nvidia-settings. The setup was painless: run gksudo nvidia-settings, right-click on the external monitor, and enable it.

Now that dual monitor setup works, my Ubuntu install has almost all the features that my Vista install does: wireless networking, hardware acceleration for graphics, fancy Aero-like effects with Beryl, and multiple monitors. An extra convenience for dual-booting is that, because of GRUB, I can hibernate both OSes at the same time, allowing me to switch between them very quickly.

I haven't tried setting up Bluetooth on Ubuntu yet, so that'll be my next challenge.

Windows permissions/account management

I hate how Windows doesn't let you delete or modify a file when a process is holding it open! Linux lets you do it and it just keeps a copy in memory to satisfy the offending process. Also, Windows has no root account! This is extremely annoying and makes me feel like the computer is giving me orders, instead of the other way around. I mean come on, Windows has more permissions than I do?! Even when I elevate privileges in Vista, there are so many things I can't do because the @%#$& OS says I can't!

Gaah! OK...trying to calm down...

Per-process permissions

I've had the idea to implement per-process permissions for a few years now, but someone on Slashdot expressed the exact same idea as mine in an easy-to-understand way (and got moderated +5 for it...):

Hey, it's time for me to bring out my rant against current Unix/Windows permissions systems! Whee.

OK, here's the short version: it's good that files on modern OS have access restricted to certain users, but that's not nearly enough. Instead access to files should be further restricted by process so that eg. Firefox only has permission to read/write to its cache, bookmarks, and download folders and that's it. If you need to upload, it should be forced to use a common API to beg the user for permission to even view uploadable files. Why? Well, exactly to stop this sort of exploit where a trojan promises to do something useful, but actually searches (using fancy new Spotlight and Windows Search, no less!) for files called "my CC#s" to send back to the mothership.

In other words, I think we should Sandbox Everything.

Apparently, SE Linux is trying to do something like this, but OS vendors need to find a way to make this whole process seamless and easy, so that I can right click on an application, go to permissions, and say, "This program I will allow to read my home directory, but only write to its own directories; that one I will let write anywhere, but read only itself" and so on.

It will be really hard to implement this in a user friendly way, but it is clearly the necessary next step in computer security. Apple, Microsoft, and (consumer oriented) Linux devs should start working on this now.