319
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by federino@programming.dev to c/linux@lemmy.ml

Imagine your friend that does not know anything about linux, don't you think this would make them not install the firefox flatpak and potentially think that linux is unsafe?

I ask this because I believe we must be careful and make small changes to welcome new users in the future, we have to make them as much comfortable as possible when experimenting with a new O.S

I believe this warning could have a less alarming design, saying something like "This app can use elevated permissions. What does this mean?" with the "What does this mean?" text as a clickable URL that shows the user that this may cause security risks. I mean, is kind of a contradiction to have "verified" on the app and a red warning saying "Potentially unsafe", the user will think "well, should I trust this or not??"

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] jbk@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 4 months ago

To 1.: dri instead of all would handle hardware-accelerated rendering. Then some webcams or controllers won't be accessible though. This one's a bit complicated, since the necessary portals for e.g. generic USB device access aren't yet there.

To 2.: portals should be used instead of that. Using them doesn't require these permissions.

To 3.: click on details and see. This is Flathub making it easy to understand for users.

Permissions should make clear whatever dangerous things an app can do. If not, why do all this effort of isolation? Firefox could delete everything in downloads, either by accident on Mozilla's side, or a privilege escalation. If the app used portals instead, it couldn't, at least without user interaction. Or a browser security vulnerability could open up any USB devices to webpages. It's all about what could happen with granted permissions. And these can 100 % be fixed in at least some way.

this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
319 points (96.8% liked)

Linux

48212 readers
878 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS