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Flatpak – Standalone Apps for Linux

flatpak.org

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Re: Flatpak – Standalone Apps for Linux

#31

Post by mtgx »

mixedCase wrote: post #15
digi_owl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

appimage seems to be less elaborate in the security department, but appimage do not require anything preinstalled on a distro to function.

As far as security goes, couldn't this be solved by a separate tool, in the good ol' Unix style? And it would be up to downstream to handle AppImage files with it for sandboxing, or not.

The whole point of flatpak is to standardize better security cross-platforms. Allowing "some other tool" to do that for you, just means most apps and most users will not take advantage of that security.

Re: Flatpak – Standalone Apps for Linux

#33

Post by mtgx »

takluyver wrote: post #19
macco wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means one package for all Linux systems, which is a huge benefit from the developer perspective.

Assuming that all Linux systems adopt it, which is far from a given. Ubuntu 16.04 already has 'snappy' packages, which seem to have similar goals.

If they have Gnome 3.20+, it should work on them. Unlike Snappy, flatpaks require Wayland, which means they won't have the security issues that snappy apps will (with X11):

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/42320.html

Re: Flatpak – Standalone Apps for Linux

#34

Post by ramblenode »

macco wrote: post #5
aidenn0 wrote: post #4

Does Flatpak do anything that nix doesn't do?

It means one package for all Linux systems, which is a huge benefit from the developer perspective.

You could say this about any package manager with sufficient mindshare across distros.

Re: Flatpak – Standalone Apps for Linux

#36

Post by mixedCase »

mtgx wrote: post #31
mixedCase wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as security goes, couldn't this be solved by a separate tool, in the good ol' Unix style? And it would be up to downstream to handle AppImage files with it for sandboxing, or not.

The whole point of flatpak is to standardize better security cross-platforms. Allowing "some other tool" to do that for you, just means most apps and most users will not take advantage of that security.

Why do we need to standardize sandboxing if that means having to install an application to install applications that are supposed to not need external dependency handling?

If Flatpak's main selling point is security, then it would be better served as as a sandboxing tool for AppImage rather than falling for NIH syndroming as is unfortunately too common in Red Hat's world.

Re: Flatpak – Standalone Apps for Linux

#37

Post by takluyver »

mtgx wrote: post #33
takluyver wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that all Linux systems adopt it, which is far from a given. Ubuntu 16.04 already has 'snappy' packages, which seem to have similar goals.

If they have Gnome 3.20+, it should work on them. Unlike Snappy, flatpaks require Wayland, which means they won't have the security issues that snappy apps will (with X11): https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/42320.html

So if you're using Wayland, they're equally secure, and if you're using X, you can use snappy but not flatpak? That doesn't seem like a great point for adoption of flatpak.

Re: Flatpak – Standalone Apps for Linux

#38

Post by digi_owl »

mixedCase wrote: post #36
mtgx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of flatpak is to standardize better security cross-platforms. Allowing "some other tool" to do that for you, just means most apps and most users will not take advantage of that security.

Why do we need to standardize sandboxing if that means having to install an application to install applications that are supposed to not need external dependency handling? If Flatpak's main selling point is security, then it would be better served as as a sandboxing tool for AppImage rather than falling for NIH syndroming as is unfortunately too common in Red Hat's world.

Because as the old name indicated, xdg-app is/was a Freedesktop project (though much of the docs are at Gnome, making one ponder porous project boundaries). And Freedesktop is all about defining that one canonical (heh) distro (making "free" something of a misnomer at best).

Observe flatpak becoming part of Fedora shortly, and then Poettering style "nudging" implemented to get Debian and the rest to adopt it.

Re: Flatpak – Standalone Apps for Linux

#39

Post by civodul »

Nullabillity wrote: post #2

I'm not at all sold on this idea of "platform" vs "application" that seems to have become so common. I'd much rather have a Nix-like system, where you still get the isolation benefits (each package specifies an exact dependency hierarchy), while also opportunistically sharing stuff that is identical between packages.

Agreed. GNU Guix makes it easy for anyone to publish a bunch of package recipes for their own software that users just need to add to their GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH.

The benefit is that it integrates with the rest of the system and thus shares software updates, storage space, and gets overall features such as isolated builds and transactional upgrades and rollback.

Re: Flatpak – Standalone Apps for Linux

#40

Post by alexlarsson »

Nullabillity wrote: post #2

I'm not at all sold on this idea of "platform" vs "application" that seems to have become so common. I'd much rather have a Nix-like system, where you still get the isolation benefits (each package specifies an exact dependency hierarchy), while also opportunistically sharing stuff that is identical between packages.

Flatpak uses ostree, which is content-addressed, so any identical files are automatically shared.
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