Flatpak 1.0 Released For Delivering The Best Linux App Sandboxing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Flatpak 1.0 Released For Delivering The Best Linux App Sandboxing

Flatpak 1.0.0 has been released this morning as their new stable release series for this Linux app sandboxing and distribution tech that previously was known as XDG-App...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Flatpak-1.0-Released

[Candy]

Please define "The Best Linux App Sandboxing"

The best in what ? Pulling and enforcing ~600mb of a propriatary runtime onto each x86 based architecture ? Is it good enough to offer "The Best Linux App Sandboxing" on PowerPC, ARM, ARM64 and other architectures ? So how does it make it "The Best Linux App Sandboxing" compared to the other solutions there is ? Everyone else claims to offer "The Best Linux App Sandboxing". And no one uses it...

[Weasel]

Please define "The Best Linux App Sandboxing"

The best in what ?

Well for phoronix any project backed/advocated/supported/etc by GNOME and/or Red Hat is instantly better than the competition. ;-)

[kaprikawn]

And no one uses it...

Do you mean that you don't use it, plus you've seen a few people be mean about it in forums, and you've extrapolated that to mean that nobody uses it?

If so, and I suspect that's the case, I think your logic is unsound.

[SpyroRyder]

Please define "The Best Linux App Sandboxing"

The best in what ? Pulling and enforcing ~600mb of a propriatary runtime onto each x86 based architecture ? Is it good enough to offer "The Best Linux App Sandboxing" on PowerPC, ARM, ARM64 and other architectures ? So how does it make it "The Best Linux App Sandboxing" compared to the other solutions there is ? Everyone else claims to offer "The Best Linux App Sandboxing". And no one uses it...

Propriatary runtime? In what respect. Everything in those runtimes, bar the Nvidia drivers, are completely open source. Secondly, it does no more enforcing than any distro or the other distribution format.

[Weasel]

Do you mean that you don't use it, plus you've seen a few people be mean about it in forums, and you've extrapolated that to mean that nobody uses it?

If so, and I suspect that's the case, I think your logic is unsound.

Pretty sure he's talking about the application developers. They usually use Appimage or Snaps. Flatpaks are usually done by 3rd party maintainers or whatever, not the authors of the applications.

[Jabberwocky]

I've been using Flatpak for a few months. I have not used/tested any advanced functionality yet. Simply installed and used slack, discord, vscode, and vlc. I would love to explore "application backups" in order to switch between distros without having to backup any non-system related configuration files.

I would like to get Adobe Reader working in Flatpak or similar framework. My dilemma is I don't want sensitive documents (that requires XFA forms) on my Windows file system and I don't want to run the Linux version of Adobe Reader outside of "a sandbox". At this point in time no open source PDF reader supports the version of XFA forms used by financial institutions and governments that I am forced to work with. Not sure if it's against Adobe Reader's EULA to use it in my desired way. I know there is a playonlinux solution which is currently my best compromise that I am aware of....

PS: Sometimes I wonder why I go to great lengths in terms of personal digital security while financial institutions and government(-related) just leaks my info without any consequences. Some coverage: Over 60 million people's personal data leaked with Master Deed's data breach and POWERFM987 take (loud intro) on a smaller leaks and the nonexistent information regulator.

[cybertraveler]

This is great news. Congratulations to those that worked hard on getting Flatpak to the 1.0 milestone. I hope you continue to maintain backwards compatibility, make Flatpak easy to use for newcomers and generally make it an awesome cross-distro packaging system.

I look forward to the day when most software and games for GNU/Linux is available in a .flatpak so the majority of GNU/Linux desktop users can very quickly and easy install and use it.

[DanL]

"North Korea Is Best Korea!"

[treba]

This is great to hear and I'm a big fan of this project! What I'm still missing the most is a gpg-portal, so I can use Thunderbird wird Enigmail, but based on the ssh-portal, it shouldn't be to hard to implement something like that https://github.com/flathub/org.mozil...rbird/issues/4

Well and concerning the issues above: neither Appimage nor snaps offer a similar level of sandboxing security wise (AFAIK). Secondly, in both cases, every app has to pull in the whole runtime, making the situation much worse than having shared runtimes like in flatpak. And finally, linux mint and fedora use flatpak by default, linux mint even pulls in the flathub repo. Fedora can't because of CS software. On the other hand, who despite ubuntu uses snap?