Look at this small fraction of what they're building:
flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-po
This doesn't include a whole lot of the baseline IPC.
It's going to get 100x larger and far more complicated as they fill out the capabilities to actually be able to sandbox more complex real apps.
Conversation
So how does an application do something like using OpenGL, opening a file with user consent, taking a picture with user consent, obtaining access to take multiple pictures within the current session (or persistently, for a camera app), and so on and so on?
1
I have never once wanted a desktop app to "take a picture". If I want to take a picture with my webcam I'll do it with a native utility I trust then open the file. This is a general principle: vetted native apps for privileged things, 3p junk in a HARD sandbox.
1
But of course this is a replay of the FDO folks trying to recreate all the mistakes of Windows on the Linux Desktop, only this time it's recreating all the mistakes of Android... 🤦🤦🤦
1
They're trying to copy the way it works on Android although often based on how things worked in Android 4.4.x to 6.x rather than how they work now. That's just what they're trying to do and isn't really how things work. The way it usually works is apps opt-out of the sandboxing.
2
"Opt out of the sandboxing" is accepting the narrative that "self-contained applications" and "sandboxing" are the same problem domain. If you reject that, it's not a problem except in a ux sense (you need to manually bind-mount the files you want to access into the ns).
2
AppImage sticks to just providing self-contained applications and has existed for a long time.
Most of the point and the work on Flatpak seems to be bringing application sandboxing. Packaging up applications is part of it but more of an afterthought and secondary thing for them.
1
1
Another *nasty* problem facing Flatpak is that it has to support systems with SELinux not in use. It can’t rely on SELinux because not every distro supports SELinux. And Flatpak apps are usually native apps, unlike Android where everything uses abstracted APIs.
1
SELinux is an implementation detail on Android from app perspective and could be something else. There's a lot of value in declarative, static security policies.
Linux kernel has decided LSMs and eBPF obsolete doing things other ways so that's another major reason for it.
2
Android used to have gid-based socket restrictions similar to the grsecurity patches and a network usage monitoring kernel module, etc. All that stuff has been removed since it supports mainline kernels. Instead netd (but nothing else) can use a bpfloader program to use eBPF.
Just the direction things are headed for Linux. They had to replace a 40 line of code kernel patch and a 500 line of code kernel module with thousands of lines of userspace management code and thousands of lines of eBPF management and compilation stuff. I don't find it cleaner.
1
They only "had to" do that at all because it was the bad security model they inherited. Better would be not to have either.
1
Show replies