macOS 10.15 Vista

You mean like how Facebook trusted the Cambridge Analytica apps which then went on to steal huge amounts of data.

Or how about all of the legitimate apps which include metrics libraries which have then gone on to steal huge amounts of data.

You simply can't trust the original signing process these days.

That shouldn’t make much of a difference, we only accept it as an excuse because it’s been the norm for so long.

But this is not how it works. Word from the App Store is sandboxed. If you open a document in Word, this is done using the native file opening dialog. This is a separate, privileged process. The file is symlinked into Word's sandbox as a result. This means that Word has access to that file from that point onwards. So, it can show a welcome screen with documents that you have previously opened (which is what applications typically do, very few applications will show all documents).

This is how things have worked ever since Apple required sandboxing for App Store apps. The problem is non-App Store apps that are not sandboxed. They have unfettered access to every file. I guess these extra permissions are to provide a certain level of protection against such apps, which is good.

Word is a well-known application. I installed it. I trust it and the corporation that wrote it.

There are many well-known incidents of trusted applications being compromised and backdoored. E.g.:

https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/mac-threat-ana...

To make things worse, the hash was updated in Homebrew cask. So even if you used a package manager, you would have installed a compromised application. Trusting applications may have been ok in the age of shrink-wrapped software. But now that applications are distributed over the web, allowing unfettered access is insanity.

More people will move to Linux.

The Linux ecosystem is also moving towards immutable base systems (Fedora Silverblue, NixOS) and restricted, sandboxed applications (Flatpak). Sure, it will always be possible to install a 70ies UNIX-style distribution. But the world is moving to sandboxing and putting up more restrictions, because the computing world became more hostile.

macOS is slowly but surely being turned into iOS.

This is getting tired and old. People said the same thing ten years ago and yet here we are, macOS is still an OS for 'general purpose computing'. I think Apple is finding a nice balance between securing the average user through sandboxing and SIP, while keeping giving the knobs to disable protections to advanced users. I say this as someone who currently uses Linux 95% of the time, but I wish Linux was as far as macOS with application sandboxing and system integrity protection.

* the previous monstrosity.

Windows will now let you carry on without updating until seriously important security updates are a month old. They really do have to force the hand of ignorant users eventually, else Microsoft gets blamed for an insecure OS.

I also don't understand where you get the idea that msft doesn't care about their desktop OS. They are basically overhauling it twice a year, for free. These larger updates do take 30 minutes, but, mind you, which is it: do they care too little or too much?

It is still not on par with Windows (I kept it just in case). I get around 8-9 hours of battery life on Windows while on Linux it is more like 6-7 hours. But it is mostly due to the fact that Chrome/Chromium and Firefox don't support hardware acceleration on Linux and I watch quite a lot of youtube videos. There is a Chromium that uses the video acceleration API (VAAPI) but it comes from the user arch repository, there is now also a snap package (I haven't yet fully tried them).