Purism's PureOS Store To Be Based Around Flatpaks, First App Announced

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism's PureOS Store To Be Based Around Flatpaks, First App Announced

Last week Purism announced the PureOS Store as their planned software / app store for their current Librem laptops and upcoming Librem 5 smartphone. The actual app store isn't available yet, but today they announced a few more details...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Purism-PureOS-Store-Flatpaks

[tildearrow]

Typo:

- The very first application to the PurOS Store is Lollypop. The Lollypop application is a GNOME music player initiative.

I have a few things to say.

1. You should really reduce the margins in the "Coming soon to the PureOS Store" badge. Are you scared or something?

[Girolamo_Cavazzoni]

Why should sandboxing be a problem rather than a benefit?

[dkasak]

Nice move. I'm loving flatpak This particular move will ensure that any future Linux-based phones will be able to leverage a significant ecosystem of apps right from the start.

[tildearrow]

Why should sandboxing be a problem rather than a benefit?

Overhead.

[SkyWarrior]

Every mobile app is sandboxed regardless of ios or android. I do not see a reason for overhead being a nuisance here. Contemporary hardware is fast enough to overcome these issues. Besides we will not be running a full fledged desktop app. I bet most people will use this phone to call text and browse the net lightly.

[Candy]

Oh another OS that creates it's own Store (based on Flatpaks), so everything is split up and ends up becoming the same binary incompatible issue as the stuff we currently have. Go for it! There should be people around that love the idea of having a Linux system installed inside another Linux system (that's what they call runtime). Flatpaks! So flat not! It's an overhead nightmare! Please don't support this insanity!

[Shiba]

Whatever. As long as there is a package manager I could still consider using PureOS.

[polarathene]

Why should sandboxing be a problem rather than a benefit?

I don't know much about Flatpak and it's sandbox, but have thought of putting some apps together where it'd be nice to distribute via Flatpak. Is the sandbox going to get in the way(and potentially require disabling entirely or require user involvement that's not suitable for casual users) for things like accessing the GPU for compute or network to run a VPN?(not sure if that would then have the same effect as routing all network traffic through the VPN or if a user has to selectively enable at least for flatpak apps to route network traffic through?)

I know with Docker containers that using hardware access directly like GPU required additional work to enable due to the way Docker works. For the VPN project I'm using a proprietary provider, they provide a CLI tool to use it on Linux, GUI on other OS, thought I could probably make a GUI app but not sure if distribution via Flatpak would complicate that functionality(pretty sure it will, or to directly access root files to configure the host network like the CLI app does, I'd have to bypass the sandbox or request certain permissions?)

[nanonyme]

I don't know much about Flatpak and it's sandbox, but have thought of putting some apps together where it'd be nice to distribute via Flatpak. Is the sandbox going to get in the way(and potentially require disabling entirely or require user involvement that's not suitable for casual users) for things like accessing the GPU for compute or network to run a VPN?(not sure if that would then have the same effect as routing all network traffic through the VPN or if a user has to selectively enable at least for flatpak apps to route network traffic through?)

I know with Docker containers that using hardware access directly like GPU required additional work to enable due to the way Docker works. For the VPN project I'm using a proprietary provider, they provide a CLI tool to use it on Linux, GUI on other OS, thought I could probably make a GUI app but not sure if distribution via Flatpak would complicate that functionality(pretty sure it will, or to directly access root files to configure the host network like the CLI app does, I'd have to bypass the sandbox or request certain permissions?)

Typically GPU stuff works out of the box with the sandbox. It's not virtualization, there's applications running inside sandbox talk to host facilities using well-defined interfaces. Applications can also request holes to sandbox for some less secure things (eg X11 access ) but end-user always has final say through application overrides.