this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Flatpaks or snaps are not safer at all, as the package maintainer decides how much sandboxing, if any, is applied by default. Manjaro also very much does have a warning in the settings page for the AUR...
@Zamundaaa Flatpaks are not installed with sudo rights. That's a huge difference.
It does not make a real difference in practice. Outside of the server space, the most important thing a user has is not access to their root filesystem but access to their home folder - to their data and fun things like .bashrc and .profile that allow to hijack pretty much everything the user runs
Not safer than the aur? Where you run a random script from some random guy who is likely unassociated with the project which has very little chance of being audited?
Or a normal package? Which has no sandboxing at all. In that case, yes, one could have a poorly sandboxes app, but the vast majority have some to a larger amount of sandboxing. On top of that, they come from a much more heavily audited place than the aur. It is, on average, safer than the average normally packaged package. Some sandboxing is better than no sandboxing
And no, their warning is not nearly enough. They should state that a person needs to read any package build script before installation and its diff while updating unless they verify the packager is the project maintainer for the application they use
Until recently, most Flatpaks were also published by random people and you had no easy way of verifying who they were.
That is not a usable argument for security. The app developer sets how much sandboxing their app gets, so if they want your data, they can get it.
And sure, you can restrict permissions yourself if you want, but that's not what any normal user does.