That is NOT classical security thinking AT ALL, and anybody who told you that is lying to you. Classic security thinking says minimize the surface area of attack…

…I’m sorry but your core argument seems to be “it’s okay that clients can do literally whatever they want because if you run anything proprietary you should be using windows” and I don’t understand this all-or-nothing stance. Do you expect me to vet every line of code that runs on my PC to make sure it’s safe? Do you think everyone should do that? Do you think the operating system should be designed so that grandmas are required to read code before they install software?

I’m sorry but this is just so obviously terrible design, I don’t know how you think gatekeeping solves anything, and that seems to be all you’re doing. Shitty clients shouldn’t be able to wreck peoples lives/computers, and we should minimize the amount of damage shitty clients can do. You also seem to believe that everyone is cognizant of the fact that they’ve been infected with something, in reality, you will go months or even decades without knowing you’ve been hit in some cases, we should minimize the amount of damage that can cause, not give them full access to everything on the entire pc because you think we should check every piece of software that runs.

There aren’t newsworthy breaches involving x.org because it’s widely regarded as not to be trusted, and has been for so long that nobody uses it for anything that needs security.

Flatpak is great and has a verification system so you know when the app is by the developer… It’s sandboxed so the clients can’t do as much damage, this is significantly easier for users to manage and prevents terrible things while not limiting anybodies usecase and allowing apps to be packaged for every distro at once. That’s pretty awesome, actually, and you can use different repos if you don’t trust flathub, i’m sure once flathub does something bad there will be alternate “more secure” ones.

Either way, I don’t want to live in the world where you make the choices for software, it seems like you want a world where everyone needs a license to use their computer.