Basically title.

I’m wondering if a package manager like flatpak comes with any drawback or negatives. Since it just works on basically any distro. Why isn’t this just the default? It seems very convenient.

  • Zamundaaa@discuss.tchncs.de
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    9 months ago

    The best part is that instead of doing what Flatpak does (just blocking things and leaving the user unable to to anything) the system will prompt you for a decision.

    No, Flatpak isn’t the problem here, portals for these things exist. The problem is that apps would have to use them, and unlike Apple, there’s noone restricting the old / unrestricted ways of doing things… So apps usually don’t port over to the portals.

    Even where the unrestricted APIs stop working, like with screen capture and Wayland, apps are excruciatingly slow to port over, because they don’t get kicked from app stores for it, and because many users can still fall back to using the old system.

      • Zamundaaa@discuss.tchncs.de
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        9 months ago

        Instead of bluntly blocking things why can’t Flatpak just simulate a full environment and just prompt the user whenever some application wants to read/write to file / unix socket at some path?

        Because the user getting a hundred popups on app start for various files the app needs isn’t exactly a usable experience. Also, blocking the app’s main thread (which is the only way you could do this) is likely to break it and cause tons of user complaints too.

        Aside from apps using the APIs meant for the purpose of permission systems, there’s no good way to make it work.

          • Zamundaaa@discuss.tchncs.de
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            9 months ago

            until apps can declare on a simple config file what paths they require

            They can, and always could. Apps aren’t doing it, most Flatpaks have just blanket “allow ~/Downloads” or “allow all of home” permissions by default - or no file permissions, and you have to go grant them manually yourself.

            Again, unless apps actually support it, no matter how good the security system is, it won’t work out.