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Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

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Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#131

Post by krautsauer »

pinkwah wrote: post #19
TekMol wrote: post #2

I never understood why a program installed in Flatpak is not just a directory on disk. When you install something via Flatpak, it still changes data in god-knows-what places on my disk. And the software itself has read/write access to god-knows-where on my disk. The answer is probably "convenience and efficiency". But I would much prefer a "An application is a directory and by default cannot access anything outside o…

By default, software has a sandboxed location that is exposed to the host in `~/.var/app/[APP]`. Most software needs access to user files. Since most applications aren't written with Flatpak in mind, they will attempt to load files using their own file browser, meaning that for the application to function at all it needs to have access to swaths of extra data. You can see what data the application can access either v…

If only flatseal could set defaults for all future installed apps too…

One thing I could imagine would be a kind of "Firefox tab containers" but for flatpak apps. On first launch, you'll have to select what folder will be ~ for it. Folder sharing between those is manual. (And yeah, often forgotten but you can have several users on linux. Sadly, permissions and switching are pain.)

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#132

Post by nkmnz »

nwellnhof wrote: post #95
nkmnz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compensation is based on the collective agreement for the public sector in Germany (TVöD-Bund) and will range from €64,000 to €82,000 per year for a full-time position, including 30 days of vacation, depending on qualifications and experience. LOL. That's €32,122 net for a full time position. And you're not even allowed to work from a place in southern Europe where you can actually live from that amount of money.

It's more like €40,000-50,000 after taxes and contributions to health care, social security and the German pension fund. Enough for a modest lifestyle in Germany. Many OSS contributors aren't motivated by money after all.

We're both wrong, it's 38.646,02€

Go to https://www.nettolohn.de and enter 64000€, choose Berlin, keep the rest. That's not enough for a modest lifestyle for a family, proven by the fact that with such an income, you're already entitled for social benefits (Wohngeld) in an average German city of 200.000 inhabitants for a family of 4: https://www.wohngeld.org/einkommen/#Wohngeldtabellen_fuer_Mi...

This is the government telling you: you can come work full time for us, but you'll not be able to provide for your family, that's why you can stand in line with all those who don't work at all to claim your benefits.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#133

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

TekMol wrote: post #2

I never understood why a program installed in Flatpak is not just a directory on disk. When you install something via Flatpak, it still changes data in god-knows-what places on my disk. And the software itself has read/write access to god-knows-where on my disk. The answer is probably "convenience and efficiency". But I would much prefer a "An application is a directory and by default cannot access anything outside o…

This is false.

$HOME/.var/app is where it's stored.

Use flatseal (or terminal) to adjust permissions.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#134

Post by nkmnz »

onli wrote: post #115
nkmnz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don’t employ software-developers. No safety for the developers. No control over developers. Thank god they don't employ them. It would be terrible for everyone involved, especially for the developers. The government in Germany is a terrible employer for someone with high work ethics and a dedication to their craft. They crush your soul with bureaucracy and drain your spirit with rules and regulation. On top of…

The construction would be a private company that works with the government. That exists already - I had applied for one before - and the pay was completely competitive, for German salaries. 80K.

What kind of program was that? Permanent employment contract (no "Befristung") without any co-financing through private investors, private grants, or the company's revenue?

This might be possible with public grants, but I've never seen it. They usually come with additional strings attached, such as being a de minimis subsidy (limited to 300k in a rolling 3 year window), requiring private co-funding (e.g. 50% for the whole project), being limited to a couple of months or maybe 2-3 years max, etc., so for competitive pay, you must almost always rely on some kind of "mixed financing": every penny above the salary that TVöD allows must be acquired from sources other than the gran. ymmv, part of the lack of attractiveness of public funding is the fact that each program differs in a million different ways.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#135

Post by bronson »

dbdr wrote: post #100
Anonyneko wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use cases naturally differ, but I'd much rather use more storage than hit yet another unresolvable dependency issue.

Nix offers the best of both worlds on this aspect: each program can depend on the exact version of a library it needs and several versions can coexist on the disk, but if two programs depend on the exact same version, it is stored only once.

Same with Flatpak.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#136

Post by bronson »

megous wrote: post #98

Dunno why people try to push app isolation on Linux desktop. It'd be better and more comfortable to make task/workspace isolation easier. You have all your apps installed system wide as usual, and you isolate processes in sandbox per your current task. Isolating individual apps and having to deal with permission prompts and protals, and persistence of permissions is uh, not very user friendly anyway. Feels like this…

> ... and you isolate processes in sandbox per your current task.

Oh is that all? If you start writing up the requirements to make that happen (without permission prompts and portals, right?), I think you'll find that would be even more difficult than app isolation and have even more backward compatibility issues.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#137

Post by collinfunk »

fs111 wrote: post #117
trlphj wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The STF is run by politologists with no clue. They fund flashy web apps that they "understand" and packaging. All the industry money goes to packaging already. They should fund foundational small C/C++ projects that are not funded by the Linux Foundation etc. Small C/C++ projects in general are treated like dirt. They get no funding but everyone relies on them. Occasionally champagne sipping SBOM industry shills draw…

> The STF is run by politologists with no clue. They fund flashy web apps that they "understand" and packaging. That is complete nonsense. Where do you get this "information"? https://www.sovereign.tech/tech lists OpenSSL, rusttls, Junit, pipewire, samba, varnish-cache, curl, Fortran, even friggin GNU coreutils and others. None of those are "flashy web apps".

Note that STF did not fund GNU coreutils. They funded uutils.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#138

Post by Shorel »

TekMol wrote: post #2

I never understood why a program installed in Flatpak is not just a directory on disk. When you install something via Flatpak, it still changes data in god-knows-what places on my disk. And the software itself has read/write access to god-knows-where on my disk. The answer is probably "convenience and efficiency". But I would much prefer a "An application is a directory and by default cannot access anything outside o…

As everyone else has written, two very different things are being mentioned n your last paragraph:

First, the application should be just a directory on disk. I wholeheartedly agree, this should be the way to install applications, and OSX has shown that this works wonders.

Second: it being limited to only read and write files in that directory. No, that's the wrong idea, the application should be associated with some extensions and should be able to edit documents in your Documents directory. It makes no sense otherwise.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#139

Post by onli »

nkmnz wrote: post #134
onli wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The construction would be a private company that works with the government. That exists already - I had applied for one before - and the pay was completely competitive, for German salaries. 80K.

What kind of program was that? Permanent employment contract (no "Befristung") without any co-financing through private investors, private grants, or the company's revenue? This might be possible with public grants, but I've never seen it. They usually come with additional strings attached, such as being a de minimis subsidy (limited to 300k in a rolling 3 year window), requiring private co-funding (e.g. 50% for the…

It was a normal developer position (with PhD bonus possibly) at a private enterprise that only worked on public projects. No Befristung, no other surprises I got aware of. I was also a bit surprised that this existed, because with private-public constructs like Fraunhofer there usually are the limitations you mentioned (and the low salary). Here the limitations probably didn't exist as the company was 100% private.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#140

Post by Shorel »

preisschild wrote: post #31
minimeow wrote: post #15

My trust in Flatpak diminished after installing the book reader Calibre and finding that despite the sandboxing Calibre was given blanket access to my drive. Apparently a quirk of the developer behind Calibre insisting upon it. No warnings or communication of the exception were given. All trust I had in Flatpak was eroded from that moment on. Curious about the podman options or similar. Having desktop apps in a conta…

> No warnings or communication of the exception were given. All trust I had in Flatpak was eroded from that moment on This is just wrong. Clients like the flathub website or gnome software show the risk posed by wide ranging access to local files, but Flatpak has to support legacy applications that don't use portals yet and thus they can't block applications having those permissions https://flathub.org/en-GB/apps/com…

> Flatpak has to support legacy applications that don't use portals yet

That was the wrong architectural tradeoff, IMO.

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