> Sand-boxing and being able to fine-tune the interactions with the host system and the Internet an app is allowed to perform is a feature absurd to be lacking.
Are these features lacking? I mean I can open flatseal and go disable Geeqie access to network and filesystem, so not sure how it is lacking - maybe I'm missing something.
Of course if I disable Geeqie access to the host FS it kind of defeats the purpose of the app, but at least I guess you can technically say it failed in that for Geeqie to operate as I expect it to, it needs access to the host fs.
EDIT: Seriously though, I am not sure how most of Gimp, VSCodium, PyCharm, Octave, Inkscape, Audacity or VLC will be useful to me or anybody else without host fs access.
Where the heck do you keep your stuff if not on your fs?
If you want to go fiddle with the specific directories that option is available to you in flatseal.
And I just had a look at some other apps like Bitwarden, Teams and Spotify, and there the permissions is much more constrained, for example none of those have blanket access to the host fs or home directory. Spotify for example is limited to xdg-music and xdg-pictures.
Epistemic Status: I've been thinking about this for a while, but have not decided on any conclusions yet.
More and more, I view flatpak-style sandboxing as something kind of like wine. It's very important that it exists, as a stop-gap measure to allow people to run the programs they currently depend on. With wine, that's Windows-only programs; for flatpack it's proprietary applications, while retaining some control over their permissions. But it's not an ideal long-term solution.
Using wine in the ideal way requires creating gigabytes of duplicate files (since you want to run one program per prefix, since they may require different and incompatible tweaks). Both it and flatpak make it harder to write shell scripts and generally to hack on your operating system. More importantly, both solve problems that, while they aren't going away any time soon, could be solved just by using high-quality, trustworthy software that targets GNU/Linux natively, without the downsides of these technological solutions.
So, while I do use both of these technologies and appreciate them very much, I prefer native packages and would rather put my effort toward better supporting people who want to write software that is distributed that way.
I mean they are lacking if we don't use Flatpack or an alternative so we have to either use it or invent something better.
> Seriously though, I am not sure how most of Gimp, VSCodium, PyCharm, Octave, Inkscape, Audacity or VLC will be useful to me or anybody else without host fs access.
I don't need any of these to access anything outside a specific directory (or a small selection of such, but I don't need them to access the full home dir, let alone the full root fs, even for reading). Hopefully flatseal can do this.
Well, as I said I see them in flatseal so either flatseal is misleading or the features are there, and I have no reason to think flatseal is trying to deceive me so I assume they are there.
> I don't need any of these to access anything outside a specific directory (or a small selection of such, but I don't need them to access the full home dir, let alone the full root fs, even for reading).
Fire up flatseal and change the permissions to what you want it. I'm sure you can also petition for xdg-code directory or something and then keep all your code there and request the packages be changed to default only work under there but I suspect most people would not be so happy with this.
I am not sure how you expect the package maintainers to know where exactly on your FS you keep your code, I also don't keep mine in my home directory.
And maybe a blacklist would make sense, but if all that is needed is a blacklist then I would harldy say that flatpak failed because it is not really that difficult to fix that deficiency.
So really everything is there, maybe everything is not available in a nice neat UI, maybe the UX is not what it should be, but the core underlying system is not "lacking" these capabilities AFAICT.
You've misinterpreted me. I don't say Flatpack is failed because it is "lacking" these capabilities. Quite the contrary. I mean we need Flatpack or something alike because that's what they offer. BUT Flatpack and Snap (and some other alike, I can't remember, there were 2 more) seem failed because everybody around seem hating them. There are just so many negative comments around. Therefore we probably need something like Flatpack but way better so people wouldn't be dissatisfied.
If you must open flatseal config, it's a bad system. What should happen is that everything should be forbidden by default, and attempts to access files or dirs are individually approved (if the file is opened interactively, it's naturally part of a trusted system file picker that approves the access and gives the filename to the app when you click the selection button), and you can make large config edits if you want to.
Seems like a pretty good idea, and it would be a nice if someone added this functionality to flatpak. I am still happy that flatpak is there because it is better than nothing and for most apps I use it with the permissions is exactly as I expect them to be.
> Sand-boxing and being able to fine-tune the interactions with the host system and the Internet an app is allowed to perform is a feature absurd to be lacking.
Are these features lacking? I mean I can open flatseal and go disable Geeqie access to network and filesystem, so not sure how it is lacking - maybe I'm missing something.
Of course if I disable Geeqie access to the host FS it kind of defeats the purpose of the app, but at least I guess you can technically say it failed in that for Geeqie to operate as I expect it to, it needs access to the host fs.
EDIT: Seriously though, I am not sure how most of Gimp, VSCodium, PyCharm, Octave, Inkscape, Audacity or VLC will be useful to me or anybody else without host fs access.
Where the heck do you keep your stuff if not on your fs?
If you want to go fiddle with the specific directories that option is available to you in flatseal.
And I just had a look at some other apps like Bitwarden, Teams and Spotify, and there the permissions is much more constrained, for example none of those have blanket access to the host fs or home directory. Spotify for example is limited to xdg-music and xdg-pictures.
Another EDIT:
flatpak also does support blacklisting of directories, see nofilesystem in https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/flatpak-command-reference...
I think support for this is lacking in flatseal currently but I'm sure it is coming.