"Snaps are containerised software packages that are simple to create and install. They auto-update and are safe to run."
I hate this and I am pretty sure they are not safe to run. Especially if they prompt you for third-party credentials. 🤦
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Replying to
Snap permissions are generally automatically enabled and the approval process is primarily by Canonical rather than requesting it from the user:
snapcraft.io/docs/permissio
It's also designed in a very coarse and problematic way. Not a good system. Still better than Flatpak though.
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What makes Flatpak worse is that the sandboxing is an opt-in feature bu developers. The developer can just configure their application as having home directory access. The reason it ended up screwed up for both is the fact that neither can hope to be the dominant environment.
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They can't realistically get developers to specifically write their applications for their app sandbox unless it's a broadly adopted, portable set of APIs and becomes largely mandatory. It's too unreasonable to expect app developers to target a bunch of different environments.
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Snap vs. Flatpak is the main issue. As long as both exist and the most widely used non-ChromeOS desktop Linux distribution family uses a different approach, it's hard to get application developers on board. The workaround was coarse permissions + largely meaningless sandboxing.
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What they really need is to have a broadly adopted approach where they can do stuff like getting app developers to do case-by-case requests to access a set of files/directories chosen by the user, etc. Like what Android forced on developers with scoped storage and other things.
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They should have forked Snap and taken away the centralized control from Canonical instead of making Flatpak. There would have a lot more hope of making a proper sandbox / permission model and getting a lot more developers on board. It still would have been really hard to do it.
I just don't see how it's viable to fragment the desktop Linux ecosystem into Flatpak vs. Snap vs. traditional vs. whatever else comes along. Maybe Valve will make an app sandbox for Steam, etc. Due to fragmentation they have to retain compatibility with unsandboxed applications.
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There are two unrelated problems these systems are trying to equate: making an application self-contained, and making it sandboxed. Solving them independently makes a lot more sense and doesn't allow a party with a conflict of interest to nerf the latter.
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