My personal take is that the only way to be reasonably sure you're OK is to install as few apps as possible and then as few plugins as possible (and ideally stick to the bundled ones only). I don’t think it’s controversial, but for some reason this is not how many people think, even if in the real world you don’t give keys to your place to everyone who says they’re cool :)
I „love” such sandboxing defaults. Apps like Docker Desktop also share the whole home by default [1], which is pretty interesting if a big selling point is to keep stuff separated. No idea why node_packages need to have access to my tax returns :). Of course you can change that, but I bet many users keeps the default paths intact.
Yeah, I forgot there’s the intermediate VM level, and user folders are shared there so that folders could be mounted to the individual containers using host paths.
I believe LS has some protections against this. Never tried them, but there are config related security options, incl. protection against synthetic events. So they definitely put some thought into that.
I treat LS as a privacy/anti-telemetry/anti-accident tool, not as anti malware.
Obviously it can detect malware if there’s a connection to some weird site, but it’s more like a bonus than a reliable test.
If you need to block FS access, then per app containers or VMs are the way to go. The container/VM sandboxes your files, and Little Snitch can then manage externa connectivity (you might still want to allow connection to some legit domains—-but maybe not github.com as that can be use to upload your data. I meant something like updates.someapp.com)
As a kid I had Atari 520ST(M) and GEM was like a… window to a magic world. It was so different from anything I had seen before (older Atari, ZX Spectrum, C64).
Funny thing is that it was also my window to Turbo Pascal, because there was a PC emulator (8086 on an 68000!). It run very slowly, but fast enough to be usable.
The contrast between the magic of GEM and the crude text mode of DOS was another thing I remember - I think it made DOS much more exciting than it was in reality :)
I would even say, that GEM itself saved the Atari ST platform from an instant failure. Apple Macintosh had an original Mac GUI, and the Commodore Amiga (developed by a former Atari team) was technically more advanced in many ways, even supporting a true preemptive multitasking. GEM on Atari ST offered a Macintosh-like UI experience for half the price.
> a Macintosh-like UI experience for half the price
The original Macintosh was launched January 1984 for $2,495.
The original ST was launched June 1985 for $799.
In other words, not half the price -- less than a third of the price. The marketing slogan was "Power without the price" and it was true.
Tech was changing faster than now in those days, but even so, the ST was a radical machine. You got a lot for the money.
By September 1984 the 512kB "Fat Mac" was launched but it was more expensive: $3,195.
Yes, Commodore's contemporary Amiga was more impressive, with better graphics, better sound, better multitasking, but it was $1,285 the month after the ST. Also, a single-floppy 512kB Amiga was not much fun. (Like a single-floppy 128kB Mac!) As the ST's OS was in ROM, a single-floppy 512kB machine was actually quite usable. For both a Mac and an Amiga, you really wanted twin floppies, or better still, a hard disk.
> In other words, not half the price -- less than a third of the price. The marketing slogan was "Power without the price" and it was true.
I had friends later marveling I missed out on the Macintosh world of the 1980s, but the pricing was not even remotely an option! So dang expensive for a lower middle class kid.
I own a Mac Plus, an Atari 1040ST and an Amiga 1200, but I didn't when they were new.
By 1989 I could just afford to buy myself a 2nd hand Acorn Archimedes A310, an 8MHz 32-bit RISC computer with a 20MB hard disk... but it nothing like it existed for any price in 1984 or 1985.
But I was still at school in 1984, and had to be happy with a 48K ZX Spectrum, a black-and-white portable TV as a display, and a single ZX Microdrive for 85kB of random-access storage.
One of the remarkable things about both the ST and the Amiga was that they had optional add-ons that contained Apple ROM chips, and with them, they could natively boot MacOS and thus run real Mac apps. Both machines' hardware capabilities comfortably exceeded the Mac's, so they could easily run Mac stuff and run it well.
Mac software was often fantastically expensive by Atari and Commodore prices, but even so, this was a very attractive option -- and even with the emulator, the result still cost substantially less than an actual Mac.
Of course, longer term, Apple's pricing means that Apple is alive and well and profitable, while Commodore and Atari collapsed decades ago.
The nickname of the machine was even "Jackintosh" (from Macintosh and Jack Tramiel, who had left Commodore and then bought Atari's computer division from Warner). At least with the 520ST they really positioned it as a cheap Mac equivilent even bundling it with a monochrome monitor
Considering its price, the Atari 520ST was a good machine. The most common PC of that era ran an 80286 CPU with MS-DOS. However, in the end, the Atari, Amiga, and Macintosh could not keep up with PC clones, which were innovating much faster. Apple just got lucky and survived to 1997 because of its loyal DTP user base. Then, Microsoft saved it because it didn't want to be perceived as a monopoly.
At the time the Mac launched and for many years after Apple continued to bring in big coin from its Apple II series sales (which was very successful in schools), not the Macintosh. So it wasn't really DTP that was keeping it surviving, at least for the first few years. Obviously that changed by the late 80s.
Safari is interesting. It's been separate, except for major macOS updates, which had it bundled. But if you had a newer Safari on an older macOS, and upgraded macOS to anything else that the latest version, then your Safari was downgraded, often causing data loss..
In Sonoma or Sequoia they started bundling all Safari updates with macOS, but right now Safari 26 appeared as a separate update in Sonoma/Sequoia—-and it will likely stay that way.
Each thing separately can be explained, but when put together it’s somewhat messy..
Yes, I also have fond memories of quite a few TUI apps for DOS. Not sure if it’s pure nostalgia, it might be. But then it feels like dark magic that you could have 40kB .COM or 100kB .EXE doing so many things and looking so nicely..
