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That has nothing to do with multiuser though. That has to do with privilege level. The way both Windows 7 and Mac OS X (and a few Linux desktop distros) allow privilege escalation is the way forward, not adding extra accounts and complexity. (Though Windows 7 is a bit weak, not requiring a Password all of the time.) So as an example, I have a single account on my Macbook under Lion, but I get asked to provide credentials whenever I do anything "dangerous". Under Snow Leopard, I went one further and created an admin account and revoked admin rights from my default account, but that was total overkill.
Multiuser is something of a fail... outside of the University mainframes when I was in college, I've NEVER seen or needed multiuser support in any capacity, be it home or work, in over three decades in the computer industry. Not to say they shouldn't work on it, just that there are much more important features they should work on first.
Note that privilege/protection level is separate from multiuser. For normal usage, the single user shouldn't be running at a "root" level. This is a security issue more than a multiuser issue.





Member since:
2006-05-30
But that doesn't mean it will be a priority. I'd rank ARM higher than multiuser. I'm not really sure I've ever needed multiuser for BeOS. It was only ever me using the machine, it's not like anyone else was. Plus, ARM is already in development... and is reasonably close to working prior to R1.