People's reaction to this is just stupid.

Schools. Colleges. Universities. Cybercafes. Businesses. Yes, even home users with kids.

Local users may not have physical access to *anything* except for the keyboard and the screen, but they are still users and still have to be allowed to *touch* the computer, even if you need to keep it locked down. You can prevent them accessing the hard drive directly, or the external ports, but you can't stop them typing on a keyboard... otherwise 99% of the world's computers are damn useless.

And this "feature" gives all of them the ability to install crap. If nothing else, that's a DoS because they could just install *every* signed bit of crap in the world.

"And it's easily configurable."

And on by default. And next-to-nobody knew about it. I don't give a damn what the option is, if there's even a *REMOTE* chance it would be something I object to, I don't want it on by default without some massive announcement.

"Giving users the ability to run code with root privileges under their account is clearly undesirable and any system that allows you to avoid this is desirable."

Again, technically "nice", practically, a nightmare. And it's the default nature that's the problem, not the feature. Home user or not, it's a silly idea to allow execution of *anything* (even signed code, which will inevitably have a flaw found in it at some point... look at any videogame console "hack") as anything other than the user that executed it, especially if it's done automatically without requiring an admin password. Windows won't let you do that (at least not by design), MacOS won't let you do that, why should Fedora be any different?

"The goal of all of this is to make a Desktop-oriented operating system were normal user activity can be carried out in a safe and secure manner in a user-friendly manner."

Yep. And even MS Windows says "This installer needs to be run as an administrator" most of the time. "runas" is your friend as a Windows admin installing software for users. There's reasons for that, signed code or not.

"Updating and installing software is a everyday mundane event."

So let's not trivialise it by making people think it is somehow "special" and has to be done automatically all the time for you because you're too stupid to type in an admin password when serious changes are made. Hell... just "memorising" the admin password on the basis of an option box the first time it's needed is more "secure" than doing this silently. And, in fact, updating and installing software is, was and always has been something more than "mundane" in terms of security.

"Especially when it comes to performing system updates it's very very desirable to have this happen with as little barriers as possible."

Agreed. But even Windows (usually) refuses to let you do stupid things with updates without asking for the admin password first, or until you log in as an admin.

"Having insecure older versions of software running on a Linux desktop when more secure newer versions are available is a serious threat to the security of the average user's system."

Totally agreed. But that's no different for any other operating system. And still Windows whinges if I try to install an MSI as a non-admin user when that MSI has to do *anything* remotely fancy.