alt Hacker NewsI don’t think the issue is really that api aren’t mature enough or that some developers refuse to use flatpak sandboxing correctly and instead use static permissions.
Linux, Unix and most computers were designed from the ground up as open system where everything can access everything.
It’s absolutely not secure, but that’s not what flatpak is supposed to fix.
Flatpak is supposed to make installations of apps easier by sharing common dependencies across all distributions. That’s all. And in a way, it works.
It has downside even on that, people who have slow internet connection will require hours to download a simple calculator app whereas it took a few seconds before, but it works.
Now on the sandboxing part, you can’t fix a sinking ship with a chewing gum in the hole. The whole structure is not designed to work this way.
It has to come from yet another distribution where permission are enforced at the operating system level, like on macOS. It’s a lot of work, and then you got to get developers on board, so it will never happen and it’s fine. Linux is not macOS, it doesn’t have a trillion dollar company backing it up and it’s not unified.
You got to play with your strength, not your weaknesses.
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Most system installed software can normally not access everything because of the filesystem permissions. It works surprisingly well.
I think the problem is the trend of installing everything in the home directory. Ruby with rvm, Node with nvm/asdf/..., Rust with rustup, ... the list is long and of course related to rapidly changing ecosystems. If the underlying technologies were to strive for more stable designs, you could as well install them in /usr through the distribution's semi-outdated packaging system. In the past this was considered a hallmark of stability, now it's considered a limiting factor.
Of course all these innovations were mostly developed with servers in mind but not so much with Desktop usage.
The other problem with containers on Linux is that they are only sandboxes when configured correctly. Otherwise they can be even worse than no container.
Just use qubes OS.
Actually, most operating systems were designed as multi-user systems where users cannot access each other's data. Trusted administrators installed software. This made sense in a world of expensive computers that needed to be shared.
In the modern world we do not share our computers with other users, and allow untrusted software to run on our machines from the internet. Without further sandboxing, it would execute as the user with access to everything for that user - which in practice means mostly everything.