BrightGlow

I don't think the regular user even knows what WebGL and WASM are, they will just wonder why their browser game isn't working and then google the cryptic setting that they have to change to get it to work.

No. I don't want to continue this discussion based on this line of questioning, sorry. Let's be good people and not fight, I'm sure you're a kind soul.

there is nothing wrong with doing such, there is zero track to you that someone somewhere on this planet is tinkering with an operating system you do not agree with the design decisions of.

I don't understand why you're saying this or what this has to do with my comment at all. I'm a random person on the internet commenting on what I would like to see. You don't have to agree, it's fine for us to feel differently.

Is it a case of the old APIs must stand (and the baggage therein), or were there some fatal flaws other OS APIs avoided?

I can't really name any POSIX APIs that I think are actually good. In my experience, any real programming for Linux and BSD requires a ton of non-standard non-POSIX APIs anyway. One major problem is: almost all of the core POSIX syscalls are blocking which IMO is really useless for modern programming. Since the past 10 years I haven't used any language runtime that focuses on single-threaded blocking tasks. Everything is about concurrency and async now. Also see this thread for various other problems with it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27183784

I understand that you or others may want to tinker with this stuff but please consider that an OS designer can be missing some valuable information that could be learned from people with decades of experience deploying these APIs on Linux and BSD and the various other UNIXes. That's the stuff that could save a lot of development time. In my opinion POSIX is really a red herring for OS designers, now the big thing people talk about is "Linux compatibility" which includes a significant number of other things besides POSIX.

but the integrity questions still remain.

For those previous elections? No, they don't. The elections themselves are settled. You are asking questions about something different which is future elections, that's an entirely different question and it's a mistake to conflate them entirely with past elections.

I feel like too many people are declaring the suspicions as moot and settled without actually looking taking the time and effort to investigate fully and properly

I really wish you would stop coming at it from this angle, it's not a productive way to look at things. The suspicions are moot and are settled by the courts. That is a fact. The elections are over. No amount of investigation is going to change the results of those past elections. No matter how many more people you get to investigate this, it isn't going to change it. An investigation could change future elections, but we would only know about that if an investigation was conducted during the period of time when it's legally allowed to happen.

And just to make it clear, there is nothing wrong with having suspicions about holes in an electoral process and discussing what we can do about it. Where you going into bad territory is when you slip in things like "there are open integrity questions" and "the election needs more investigation and isn't settled" and other things that are sowing doubt about the validity of the whole process. In the best case, those statements are misleading, and in the worst case, they're completely false. We may not like that some concerns are dismissed for partisan reasons but you're leaving out how in a lot of cases, that is completely legal and is the system working as intended. I'd love to fix this too but engaging in this type of rhetoric on social media is not going to help there.

Please avoid making this argument, it's a false equivalence. Youtube is not self-censoring those things.

If you want me to ask a similarly misleading line of questioning based only on trying to draw false equivalence from principles: Currently Youtube is self-censoring porn. Is the side of "youtube should become a porn site" really the side you want to root for?

I've read about plenty of this, all of that is completely normal. Every election people will try to game the system. It happens. We deal with it on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes we do a better job than other times. It's not fundamentally different from any other social system.

does not mean the issue has been decisively proven or disproven

Yeah you're technically right but the point is: that doesn't matter to the election. It's of historical interest only, you can't use it to try to prove that an election didn't happen the right way because our system doesn't work like that. Elections aren't decided based on an investigation that happened 60 years in the future, if that was the case then we could never have an election because we'd have to wait 60 years for the results.

I don't see how I am missing the point. Everything you've said would be mostly within the guidelines. Where you would get into trouble is if you did start saying "Nixon really won" or otherwise trying to say the election was fraudulent, because that would be false. You may want to re-read the guidelines to double check this.

But you may want to be careful with statements like "We now know the 1960 Nixon vs. Kennedy election is suspect". The election is not suspect and the end results (Kennedy won) are not going to change. It was settled decades ago. Specific events like you mention might have been suspect, but the election itself was not, it was settled legally according to the way the system worked at the time.

the election process is vulnerable to fraud and needs reform or oversight

But that's the thing though, just this saying this on social media in the context of any election is not meaningful and can cause harm, and is causing harm. Every election has statistical oddities, errors, disputes, recounts, and other issues. All of these mentioned election processes already do have oversight and formal reform procedures in place. That's all a normal and expected part of the process. It's a constant ongoing process to improve them. We can never make a perfect system so each election year we just do our best and then resolve the resulting legal disputes in the traditional manner. That's the way the system works.

It's like a blueprint for what to review further.

Why? Something going viral on social media is not proof or evidence that it happened or not. And as you know, without these policies anyone can spread false information about any election for any reason they want.

And the thing is: we know who won those elections. This is not a matter of dispute, it's legal fact. It's great to review things and to theorize about what would have happened if elections were run differently (there was a lot of this around the 2000 US election for example) but just saying something like "the election was fraud, Gore really won" is egregiously false and does nothing besides undermine the democratic process.

You could strip out systemd and put in a custom init system that doesn't conform to the typical Unix daemon startup expectations.

I actually don't think you can do this, or would even want to. Systemd doesn't really do anything special beyond putting some tooling around various Linux features. I've seen a lot of other Linux inits and all of them have to conform to those expectations because that is how Unix and Linux are supposed to function, if the init doesn't do those jobs then the system doesn't work.

You could write your own X11/wayland-like display server thing (like Android does)

Conceptually the Android window system is not really that different from Wayland. X11 is more the outlier. If you're building a new window system, you probably want to do things with a very similar approach to how Wayland and SurfaceFlinger work. No matter what you do there you're going to be constrained by the requirements of getting OpenGL and Vulkan apps to work.

You spent a lot of time explaining this and I agree with everything you said. But that's a really long-winded technologist's way of putting it. I'd personally phrase in a simpler way: music is useless and has no value. It serves no purpose besides entertainment. It can be made trivially for literally zero cost by anyone who has working hands or vocal cords, no technology or investment is required. NFTs certainly don't and can't change this. (Disclaimer: I am a musician and I've spent a lot of time working on music apps. It's a hard sell out there for everybody)

I tried really hard to like SerenityOS but I think the decision to make it a UNIX-like POSIX system is a mistake. The POSIX API is outdated and broken in a lot of ways. I wish people would stop making UNIX-like operating systems, we have enough of those to deal with considering just the Linuxes and the BSDs.

With a reputation system you'd still want to do your due diligence and manually check things. Even the most trustworthy people make honest mistakes sometimes.

Blind people can also get malware...

Not sure about other browsers but this is incorrect for Chrome and Firefox. They both have flags to disable WebGL and WASM. Please be careful not to spread misinformation, we owe it to ourselves to research our posts well.

You may want to try this project: https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

But I don't recommend using only ALSA without a sound server on a desktop, the usability of it is pretty bad.

Well I don't usually need to connect audio from Firefox directly into a DAW or synthesizer. And technically that could still be done with Jack, it's just a bit harder to do because you have to create additional pulseaudio sinks first.

Sure, but that's one distro.

Sorry, I don't mean the article is trolling or bad-faith. What I mean is that the author seems to have been trolled and the article is only responding to that trolling. That's just my guess after seeing this 4chan wiki and after seeing some very hostile statements made about this over the years. The discourse is being driven by trolls. The questions asked here aren't "bad" per se but if there had been any communication with the real developers at all then I wouldn't expect anyone to ask these questions, they don't make any sense in context. It seems to me the only reason they're being asked is because trolls spread misinformation about the project. Please try to avoid falling into the same trap, I'm noticing that you're doing it and it's not helpful. Don't let the trolls win.

I'll go a step further and say: I don't think your assessment is correct. There isn't anything absurd about an open source project missing a popular feature, it's a completely normal situation. Most open source projects are underfunded and understaffed and seem to have a giant "wishlist" of unimplemented features. Also, please avoid making hostile jokes or mocking people, that's more of that cruelty-focused 4chan-style discourse that is against the rules here. It's not an interesting discussion. When you drift into that unproductive stuff that's just being cruel to other people, I would say that absolutely is unfair trolling, so please don't do that. A more productive discussion might be something like: we discuss ways to fund the project, we discuss ways to get bugs fixed, we discuss technical advancements that could help speed things along. Does that make sense? I'm happy to discuss that stuff with you further.

And lol at the goalpost moving

This again is what I mean, please don't dismiss my comments like this, it's really hostile. I gave you an answer for what it costs, and I also explained why that's not really a good question to ask. If you want me to clarify something then just ask, I could also suggest some better questions to ask if you really do want to help open source developers.

I'm not a GNOME developer and I have no idea what you mean by self-righteous. I don't particularly care what the "right" way to do things is, I can only notice areas where there are problems and then give suggestions. And even if I was a developer, it would be incorrect to assume that all other developers act the same way. So please avoid making these vague characterizations about people, they're really not meaningful and they could be perceived as insults.

If you don't want to use GNOME or Flatpak that's perfectly fine, I'm happy for you to choose whatever you want. But some of the statements you've made here are false, including the assumptions you've made about me. That's not being respectful to me or to the project when you do that. Please don't spread misinformation or make decisions based on false information, that damages the community and it also hurts both me and you. If you're not actively using/developing a certain project or in regular contact with the developers then I would suggest not making definitive statements about it or assuming that your experiences are shared by everyone. IMO it's a mistake to quit a discussion based on false information. If you ever change your mind and decide you want to report those bugs, the door is wide open for you.

I don't know about alsa, I don't remember what happened when I tried that years ago. Yeah Unix permissions is bad, Pipewire is definitely better there. The security is a big improvement but I also wouldn't say that's anything revolutionary.

I think they break third party apps because it's a real pain to keep maintaining a bunch of incompatible old versions of an API forever.

Also your last paragraph doesn't follow to me because the whole reason these apps exist is because they are web apps. They wouldn't exist otherwise. That's the whole reason they are sustainable now in the first place. They're the default because it's the cheapest and easiest way to deliver a product for billions of users.

Really? You think programs can't just load all of the libraries in a given directory?

They can't, a library implements a specific API.

except they still boil down to the exact same interface. "Button X was pressed... button Y was released... moved +X+Y"

Well no, with multitouch the interface has changed from that to a series of events, and you have to handle gestures too. Some apps still don't support these. This isn't just for mobile devices, laptops all have these touchpads now too.

Or are you going to tell me that we should support a screen whose resolution is measured in _more than_ billions of pixels wide and tall?

This would be for pointing devices, so yeah, with a high DPI mouse then you might want to make it 32-bit or 64-bit. This wouldn't be for billions of pixels but to subdivide into many fractions of a pixel. Example: the original Win32 API only uses 16 bits for mouse coordinates, so a new API is needed and the apps need to be changed if they want to take full advantage of that mouse.

That doesn't change the fact that unicode is broken in most apps.

Please report those bugs to the developer, that should be fixed.

Programs that do handle that type are exactly what I want to stop. I absolutely never ever want to copy HTML from somewhere but there's often no way to disable it. Formatted text? Trash. Send me a file. Picture? Trash. Send me a file.

I can't agree with this, I copy formatted text and pictures all the time. Your program should have the ability to remove the formatting.

I can't agree, ever since jack2 I actually never had any problem getting it to work with pulse. You may be thinking of jack1. Pipewire does make it easier to do this though.

In my opinion, that article is pretty insubstantial and is mostly just responding to the same 4chan trolling mentioned in this wiki. It's just not a productive line of discussion and doesn't make any sense in the actual context of how open source works. But I'll answer your question anyway.

I think there are a few GNOME developers that have patreons or some other crowdfunding/bounty thing but it's not a major source of income for most. Getting $2 a month from a handful of people is not enough to fund a developer for any serious work. If you want to fund someone for real then you should probably pay a real developer salary which would be at least $75k-$100k a year in the US, and more if you want them to have competitive benefits. The price could be different in other countries. You might be able to hire one of the Linux consultancies to do it for the equivalent hourly rate. This is of course if you work for a company that can afford that. If you're a normal non-rich person then you're probably out of luck here, sorry. Software is expensive.

I also would be wary of anyone who guarantees they can get something into the master branch. To me that's scammer talk. Getting patches merged is an ongoing conversation between the developers and maintainers, you don't want someone who's just pushing code through without any checks. And if they're saying they can get something through before any code is even written and before anyone even knows if the solution is viable or not, then I would view that with extreme skepticism. If it's a major feature then it may end up taking months or years for it to get reviewed and merged, or it may just sit around for years and not get merged at all because it causes issues in some other part of the code, or it could end up being obsoleted by something else before then, or it could just end up being low priority and nobody gets around to it... or any number of other things really.

Hopefully that clears up some of those bizarre statements that are in that article.

Your assumption that everyone cares about this is false, there's no "misconceptions" here. The only misconception is the one that GNOME is the center of the Linux universe... which is tacitly untrue.

I never said that everyone cares about this, nor did I say that GNOME is the center of the Linux universe, not sure where you got either of those from. I agree those statements are not true. However, developers of some apps do care that their apps are broken by themes. If you want to make your fonts 15% less viewable that's fine, I'll be happy to give you tips on how to do that, but you deserve to know about the technical issues with that and why it causes enough trouble that app developers don't want to support it. Just my opinion: impeding the accessibility of your system and manually compiling all your apps just because of a perceived slight against some developers is a bad idea.

GNOME is an extension of a modular system, one that was also designed to be built upon to create better experiences. GNOME once also shared that sentiment of modularity

So this is a misconception, theming was always buggy and really badly supported in both GTK2 and GTK3, and considered mostly a hack. It kind of worked if people kept updating the themes constantly but it was a really bad uphill battle. You can continue hacking things that way if you want, but I expect some app developers will try to discourage you from doing it because eventually it really only becomes a source of bugs with no benefit to the user. Personally I also would do discourage you from that if you're trying to accomplish a specific goal with these platforms besides just messing with the font contrast, it could be a lot more productive if you wanted to work on a more robust way of doing things. But it's really up to you, I can only present you an option of what to do and then you have to decide for yourself.

You'll never install it without having another, feature-complete package manager operating alongside it.

This is true for a lot of distros, but Flatpak isn't just a package manager.

Flatpak tries doing a hundred things, and can't do a single one better than another, dedicated tool. There is no argument here. Flatpak is not, cannot, and will never be considered a real package manager. It's a second-class supplement at best, and abhorrent bloatware when it stops working properly.

I'd advise against this type of strong rhetoric, it's easy to make these hyperbolic flourishes but what you've said isn't really true and lacks any facts to back it up. The underlying technologies (mostly ostree and bwrap) are pretty generic and are dedicated tools by themselves, Flatpak just puts those together with some repos. You could use those tools alone if you wanted. I'd agree that Flatpak would be pretty redundant if other package managers used ostree and could access its repos, but currently they cannot. It provides something different than your distro package manager.

I understand that you use GNOME and are passionate about it, but your insistence on right and wrong answers is absolutely not what drives the Linux community.

So your statements here aren't correct. Please avoid accusing me of being a fanboy. If you really want to know my opinion, I'll use any desktop and I'm not passionate about any of them, GNOME is just one of them. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. But if you're asking questions about GNOME and GTK then I'll give you straight answers, they are also part of the "Linux community" and it doesn't help either of us to misrepresent them. There are certain facts about that which it is not helpful for us to disagree on, because they are just that: facts, not opinions.

Then don't make them. Just do what every other desktop has done since 1992, give people the option to configure things the way they want

Well some users may have no need to configure that. And like I was saying with complex apps, it may be that you don't need to give users a really complicated way to configure every little detail. It may be that what they really want is just a way to swap between "presets" and that will be enough for everyone. You don't know until you actually do the design work and iterate. This of course is a more complex and nuanced topic than just saying "give us an option" or "give us a default" or something like that.

If corner-cutting starts to affect power users, you need to go back to the drawing board and re-think things.

Well no, in my experience power users are just as likely to be trying to accomplish something specific like that. When you get down to it their usage patterns are not particularly different.

Yeah, real motivation going on there. Of the 4 apps they mention needing CSD, only one got it. Is that really what 3 years of progress should look like for that kind of initiative?

I really don't know what their progress goals are but there are many other GNOME apps not listed there that use CSD, you should look at them if you're interested to fully understand the progress.

GNOME is not Linux, and the issue is that the GNOME developers are making too many decisions on behalf of the end user.

Yes I agree that GNOME is not Linux. But GNOME developers are making decisions on behalf of GNOME users. That's what they're supposed to do, those are the end users they support. I don't understand what your issue here is. If you don't use any GNOME software then their decisions won't affect you.

I do take issue when I can't use a desktop environment because my preference for handling packages is apparently verboten

Which preference is this? Can you elaborate?

and now they've decided to remove features that I liked. It's a regression on the level of dropping the Unity desktop, but even more user-hostile.

I'm sorry to hear that, but I hope you can understand that every project cannot support infinite features. If it's desired to add a new feature then sometimes an older feature that has some overlap with it will have to be removed. That's just the unfortunate reality, nobody is trying to be hostile to you. And it's not really feasible to ask software developers to stop adding new features, if they did this then everything would stagnate.

And even still, I have a hard time calling GNOME in it's current state much of a platform. It exhibits constant crashing issues on my Haswell devices which means I can't use it on half my devices, and it only truly functions on one or two distros.

Can you please report these bugs? I've never experienced this. If those are legitimate bugs then I'm sure someone will want to have them fixed. It could possibly be a driver issue that is not strictly related to GNOME.

Not to go "us vs them", but KDE has no problem maintaining a stable, usable desktop even across major releases. I'm utterly dumbfounded by how the current maintainers of GNOME feel so self-righteous in their redesign, especially considering the state of their recent releases.

Please understand that not every project has the resources to test with every hardware combination, it may just be that you hit some unusual and unfortunate combination of hardware and software that blows up. It's just lucky for you that KDE doesn't hit that.

Not every application needs a UI toolkit. There are also a lot of UI toolkits. Now many of them struggle with the fairly unimpressive task of displaying a window with reasonable looking borders. That's not a good user experience, and it's certainly not a good developer experience.

Sure, but if you don't use a toolkit then you need to take care of the missing pieces on your platform, in the case of Wayland one of those missing pieces is window borders. If you're a toolkit developer and you can't implement window borders, then I would suggest not advertising your toolkit as having complete support for Wayland.

I really do have a lot of opinions regarding what you are saying, but I'm honestly running out of steam on replying to each point blow-for-blow because it feels like I already expressed my point and the reply is just what I said but inverted.

I'm sorry if this seems rude but both your opinion and my opinion don't matter and I don't care how you feel about this. That's nothing personal towards you. We're just two people having an informal conversation, it's just not helpful for us to look at it like we're trying to sway each other's opinions, so don't feel like you have to convince me of something or rebut my opinions. If you feel you don't want to support a certain type of decorations then that's perfectly fine, I'm happy for you to carry on doing that. But the technical reality of the situation and what that means for the challenges you may face is a different discussion from what you or I feel, and clearing up the technical stuff is all I'm interested to discuss.

If you have some other technical things to present then please do that, otherwise you're right that there is nothing more to discuss here. I'm only typing here to correct some misconceptions that I saw you had about the whole situation with libdecor. I find that most people who are upset about the situation don't really understand it fully or missed some key piece of information. I usually try not to do it point-by-point but it's really hard when you list a lot of points. However it does seem that a lot of your statements are stemming from a few initial misconceptions, so I can summarize that if you want.

This is your problem, and GNOME's too: GNOME doesn't own the Linux desktop.

I'm sorry I have no idea what you mean. This is not about the Linux desktop, this is about GNOME. If you don't want to support GNOME then there's no reason to discuss this, because it doesn't matter, you can keep going about your way and you don't have to care about them. Am I missing something here?

The status quo on GNOME should not drive protocol standards that impact the entire Linux desktop ecosystem. Why should GNOME's fairly isolated status quo be the burden of every application or app toolkit developer?

They aren't, and they don't? I'm extremely confused as to what you're talking about here. This again is about what you would have to do to support GNOME. Not any other Linux desktop.

The inverse is a burden on the compositor. There are far more apps and app developers, and even toolkits, than there will ever be Wayland compositors.

This doesn't matter because the issue here is how to make apps that aren't broken. Some things simply cannot be fixed in the compositor, they have to be fixed in the app, and this is one of them. I sympathize with your concern and I wish it wasn't the case, but sometimes app developers have to do some work that they don't want to do.

Because you will get a vendored copy of libdecor. In a runtime like the Steam runtime, you might wind up attempting to load a version of libdecor linked against an incompatible libc if you try to use the system version. This is not a problem that would occur if a protocol were used instead.

That isn't how flatpak works at all. You don't use the system version, you only use the vendored version, and you do that specifically to avoid that linking problem you mentioned. Also libdecor does use the protocol so I have really no idea what you're talking about again here, sorry.

libdecor also has the potential to create other problems.

Sure but the problems there would be exactly the same as they would be if you did it all in the server, so libdecor is not making it any worse. The only difference is that the code moved to the client.

If GNOME cared about what experience was good for the user, they would have cared about the fact that the Wayland compositor they shipped into production runs many games with missing window borders because of their own initiatives and sway within the Wayland ecosystem.

Well I'm not sure if you saw this part in my previous part but those apps are broken according to the xdg-decoration spec. It has really nothing to do with GNOME at all. All Wayland apps need to provide fallback window borders if they want to work correctly in all situations, if they don't then that's a bug.

The user experience in GNOME is genuinely worse due to this strange insistence on moving a problem from one location to another.

I don't see why that concerns you if you're not a GNOME user and you have no interest in supporting GNOME. GNOME can deal with their own problems, if that causes them to lose users then that's something only they have to care about, not you.

Continued...

I've noticed a lot of smaller creativity/productivity apps are not available in distro repos. They're far too niche to get attention from distro packagers. However a lot of them are in Flathub and they work on any distro.

I find it curious you make that comparison about Pipewire because to me, Pipewire is just an incremental improvement for audio, not really changing anything on a giant scale. Most pro audio apps were already using Jack and got all the benefits of that type of system. Pipewire only makes it so they could connect to the odd Pulseaudio app, which is pretty rare. Not meaning to downplay it or anything. It is still a pretty good improvement, but its major contribution is what it does for video, not audio.

I don't really want to argue with you but I think you're still basing this on false information or on misconceptions, I'll try to clear things up. Of course you are free to use or not use whatever packaging solution you want for whatever reason.

All the apps I use (even the GTK4 ones) adopt my system theme perfectly fine as long as I'm not using Snaps/Flatpaks/containerized distribution.

That's great for you, unfortunately this cannot be guaranteed for all combinations of themes and apps. There are "tricks" you can do to get your themes to work in a flatpak such as mounting the theme directory into the container but this would probably be considered an unsupported hack, I wouldn't recommend it. The only way this could ever be supported is if somebody tested your theme with every version of every flatpak app and then filed/fixed bugs everywhere, which is really not a reasonable thing to ask of theme developers so it probably won't ever be supported.

GTK has always had fallback stylesheets for this exact purpose

This is not about the fallback style sheet, this problem is specifically about the style sheet used by the app and how it can conflict with the theme. I'm not sure if you're familiar with CSS, but the way it works is that anything from the theme can override things from the fallback style sheet and that could mess things up if the app expects something different to be there.

Flatpak has decided to circumvent them because of the Gnome foundation's wheel-spinning "don't theme our app" movement. There's quite literally nothing stopping the Flatpak devs from referring to your systems default stylesheet for all UI draws.

Have you read the "stop theming my app" page all the way to the bottom? Please re-read it if you can, it shows examples of how theming is unreliable and can break apps. That's what would be stopping them. Also this wouldn't really be up to "flatpak devs" to handle either, this would be up to the maintainers of the GNOME SDK and app developers.

That's more work than I have to do on every other version of every package I use

How? It's a bug, it's not different from any other bug that you would report. Once it's fixed you don't have to worry about it.

Wait, so now they have two packages to maintain? One being the true binary copy of their application, and the other being a sandboxed version that is apparently more likely to break?

No, I've noticed often the flatpak maintainer and your distro maintainer are different people. There isn't any "true binary copy", unless you consider the binaries that are provided by the developer, which you should check which ones those are. They could be flatpak or they could be something else. And actually the sandboxed version should be less likely to break since the dependencies are pinned and there are less moving parts there.

it's really just "another competing standard" a-la XKCD

Yes, that's sort of true, you could also use Snaps or AppImage or a similar thing. However these are not the same as distro packages so in that regard they're not "another competing standard". This is a package that you can install on any distro and have a reasonable guarantee that you'll get the exact same version that runs in the exact same environment.

Ah yes, the classic UNIX config directory '~/.var/app/', a directory that never existed until Flatpak came along and decided it was somehow the new standard. Great stuff!

I don't understand what you mean here. If you're being sarcastic, please don't do that, it doesn't add anything of value to the conversation. These apps are sandboxed, so you probably want them in a separate directory so they don't clobber your home directory. There is no UNIX config directory for sandboxed apps so they had to come up with something new. What exactly is the problem here?