Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

I never understood why a program installed in Flatpak is not just a directory on disk.

When you install something via Flatpak, it still changes data in god-knows-what places on my disk. And the software itself has read/write access to god-knows-where on my disk.

The answer is probably "convenience and efficiency". But I would much prefer a "An application is a directory and by default cannot access anything outside of that directory" approach.

I loved Flatpak until I started building a MiniPC with a 112 GB internal disk for HTPC usage... Then I felt the pain of having to get all slightly different dependency versions for each little program I wanted.

The box' cost already topped the project's budget so no new disk for it. I'm back to "proper .deb packaging please"

My trust in Flatpak diminished after installing the book reader Calibre and finding that despite the sandboxing Calibre was given blanket access to my drive. Apparently a quirk of the developer behind Calibre insisting upon it. No warnings or communication of the exception were given. All trust I had in Flatpak was eroded from that moment on. Curious about the podman options or similar. Having desktop apps in a container with selective access to system resources seems like it would be more secure and configurable if configured correctly. Flatpak as it stands seems to be a legacy solution to what should be a container and namespacing solution.

Waste of money.

"For Modal, a robust app sandboxing story is essential to creating a Free Software OS that is competitive with modern mobile platforms."

Why? Focus should be desktop, not mobile.

We have enough mobile stuff that creeped in already.

Maybe I am too propagandized, but honestly after going Nix I can’t help but feel like this stuff is fundamentally a waste of time

I'd rather they invested €500k in contributing to the maintenance of distribution packages so I don't need to deal with Flatpak (on Debian here).

To be honest i don't see how having flatpack going to help the (european/german) "sovereign tech" initiative.

A waste of money if you ask me.

I think there are much more important issues that should deserve money and attention.

Flatpak is great for installing, but as a happy Aurora user, it’s annoying and it breaks things all the time. Every desktop app i use has some broken feature. Sandboxes as another permissions panel suck. Simple browser-like permissions that allow prompted overwrite would be WAY better!

Now i have media organizer programs that deletes my files if i try to write on a networked drive. Games that can’t see the controller. Chat apps that can’t see attachments. Music app that can’t save at all. Good luck accessing any binary and using it in a script.