The computer should earn the trust we give it.

ECC memory, cosmic rays happen.

Endurance SD cards –and even these should not be trusted.

Storage — would be nice to have two or more m.2 drives on a laptop. older laptops may have msata and sata. Choose a brand with very high TBW and warranty.

UPS, I would like to have a desktop that has a laptop like power battery and battery in it. A nice big LiFePO4 battery and a power supply that directly uses it without an inverter. Desktops are great if that was the case.

All in one computers have less clutter to break, I would consider that for a regular home user, but laptops are probably still better.

Ruggedization, business class laptops are likely good enough, a latitude, precision or thinkpad, they have replaceable parts Frameworks is omitted because they don’t have mouse buttons, but it doesn’t matter if being used with a keyboard and mouse.

Raid, raid 1 could be nice, but having backups periodically go from one drive to the other may be sufficient. Have your data on multiple drives.

Unmount drives before removing –filesystem cache needs to be written and FAT integrity verified.

File Versions — People accidentally save over files.

File Save Dialog — clicking a file should not put it in the filename field, that causes an erroneous overwrite. directory traversal should not happen outside of allowed space, file names should be typeable, within the charset of a few limited languages, and have excluded character list to maintain compatibility with other operating systems and filesystems. If an existing file is that way, it should get an alternative name that is unique and typeable.

System should return to known state when restarted, an option to restore session is permissible.

Content must not escape the browsers.

A web page should not be able to give a popup that goes out of the browser window. an exception may be the select and save file dialogs, but an alert should stay inside the browser, and any sound effect should go thru the mixer as originating from that page.

input buffers need to not overflow, holding down a key on the computer should not break the computer.

Clicking multiple times on a button should not cause multiple actions (by default, some games or ui interactions to move a slider might be ok) spooling up multiple copies of a program is not right.

Tapping is not an action for a risky action.

UI element actions should be classified as safe, risky, dangerous, authentication required. Dangerous actions are normally done by double clicking, but many people cannot do a double click, so some other captcha may be needed.

authentication required would confirm that the user is who they are by entering a secret or having a facial recognition poll or presence of an authenticating device.

deleting a major set of files from my home directory in a way that skips the trash may require a captcha and authentication.

file save dialogs should restrict the characters to the languages on my machine and have a blacklist of some special characters.

changing options in the desktop should have a confirmation, like apply (KDE rocks)

alt-space should open a menu

middle click operates autoscroll

rightclick is a query of the UI element for what can be done.

tap to click is turned off.

repeated garbage input should be questioned. –this is hard, but mashing keys should probably give a system beep.

typing at above a human capable rate would cause the device to disconnect and a captcha presented.

keyboards and mice and usb hubs should be authenticated. did you mean to attach this device? network interfaces too. an exception may be for when they are connected at boot, but a display of a tree of what is connected should be available. A display of topology should be a part of the display manager/login screen, the dates of changes to this tree should be shown to give warnings to the user that new devices are installed.

secure boot probably a good idea

tpm yes

Notifications

should not take focus away from the user operating

Automount – probibited the alternative is to make a discoverable list of devices

Flakey cables and hardware, there should be a number of

Devices being added should give a warning notification that devices are blocked.

and or captcha to enable the device or contact the administrator.

ITPro did a nice video about some of this on windows 10. KDE had a very nice volumes manager that shows usb drives, but it stopped being able to see system drives.