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Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

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Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#141

Post by megous »

bronson wrote: post #136
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.

Actually I use that approach daily and it has very few usability issues, at least in my mostly terminal based workflow. GUI apps show me environment to which they belong in the title bar. Happy with that.

Can't imagine how per-app isolation would even work for me. Sounds like something inspired from android world where there's no such thing as having the same app run mutliple times on different workspaces/windows, etc. and the usability correspondingly suffers.

Portal thing even bit me recently. I leave dbus and window manager socket in the sandbox, so I can use GUI apps without too much trouble, and a few months back firefox started showing me files from outside the sandbox and hiding files in the sandbox in file save dialog, which confused the hell out of me, until I found out someone decided to add a remote file access via some dbus service or whatever. Dangerous. I had to remove dbus socket sharing completely from the sandbox at some inconvenience.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#142

Post by NekkoDroid »

a-french-anon wrote: post #94
ximm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have bad news for you: The flatpak developers plan to stop using bubblewrap. They say it is no longer necessary because most distros now support unprivileged user namespaces. https://youtu.be/NsVhkz2Xl0E?si=-ypxvTlRukCZLql9

Bubblewrap is a CLI interface for these, you know? It's been some time since bwrap recommended avoiding their SUID wrapper.

From my knowledge its a yes and no. One of the "benefits" of bwrap was that it was a SUID binary and thus maximised compatibility with systems that disabled unprivileged user namespaces. With that barrier gone you can implement a more tailored sandbox to the usecase instead of working around limitations in bwrap. Like, all things considered, bubblewrap as a whole isn't that much code (quick check seems like ~6k LOC) and does somewhat limit the API you can work with.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#143

Post by nwellnhof »

nkmnz wrote: post #132
nwellnhof wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 governme…

> We're both wrong, it's 38.646,02€

Assuming you don't pay Kirchensteuer, it's almost €40,000.

> you're already entitled for social benefits (Wohngeld)

No, you're slightly above the threshold but in any case this doesn't say much. If you're talking about families, I'd also assume that your partner earns a little extra.

Anyway, the median gross income in Germany is €54,000, so you seem to be implying that the majority of Germans are unable to live a decent life. Maybe you should talk more to people outside your social bubble?

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#144

Post by hollerith »

mike_hearn wrote: post #57
Gigachad wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also just hard to make breaking changes on Linux. Apple can declare something is changing and you have 1 year to get with the program. In Linux you have to bargain and plead with devs over 10 years to change something. Restricting an app to not have file system access is a breaking change. It would have been dead in the water if they didn’t meet half way and make file system access an optional permission.

Apple has much better backwards compatibility than Linux. The APIs haven't changed much since the Carbon->Cocoa transition 25 years ago, and SwiftUI (but that's optional). The impact of app sandboxing on developers was small - and sandboxing is universal on macOS now, there are only different levels of sandboxing but no such thing as unsandboxed apps anymore. Apple's introduction of sandboxing to an app ecosystem des…

>macOS is the most secure desktop OS by a long way, it's not even close.

GrapheneOS has become a desktop OS (because of all the work Google has done to adapt Android for desktop/laptop use) and its security exceeds macOS's.

You can connect a Pixel 8, 9, 10 or 11 to a USB-C DisplayPort-alt-mode hub and have a GrapheneOS desktop that way. In a few months, you might be able run GrapheneOS on a Googlebook.

Aside from that I agree with your comment, particularly your assertion that "Linux trails far behind" macOS in security.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#145

Post by LtWorf »

phoghed wrote: post #87
buran77 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point isn't how much Google spends on stuff in general, it's their wallet. What's important is how much they contribute back to the development of the tools they actively use to fill that wallet.

They contribute a lot of open source software themselves, you can probably find a better example of a company benefitting from such but not contributing much

They do? Anything meaningful?

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#146

Post by 087532379864 »

herrherrmann wrote: post #106
xyzelement wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Director of Technology (all genders)" I guess I hadn't looked at German want ads ever. Is mentioning the gender as the most important qualification - literally in the headline - standard practice? Also I guess Berlin is cheaper but seeing 99.5k EUR as the upper bound salary for a director role is a bit jarring. I guess it's just the "otherness" of it but the DEI statement is shaped oddly to an American eye too. Plea…

The “(all genders)” bit is probably just based on the fact that they translated the German job ad (in German you have to be more explicit with the male/female/all versions of titles, because the default is usually just the male form). So, it’s not a qualification, but just a way to be inclusive to applicants of all genders (we have a diversity problem in our industry). The salary is bound to the limits of the public…

[dead]

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#147

Post by phoghed »

LtWorf wrote: post #145
phoghed wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They contribute a lot of open source software themselves, you can probably find a better example of a company benefitting from such but not contributing much

They do? Anything meaningful?

I assume you’re being sarcastic, but for anyone else that happens to read this and doesn’t know for some reason.

Kubernetes, Chromium, Android, Go, TensorFlow, Dart, Angular, many more that I can’t recall off the top of my head or ever heard of.

Then all the research they publish, transformer, map reduce, bigtable, spanner, again the list goes on.

I don’t know what companies I’d rate as high as Google in terms of open source contribution and impact. RedHat. Maybe MS and Meta are close.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#148

Post by buran77 »

phoghed wrote: post #147
LtWorf wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do? Anything meaningful?

I assume you’re being sarcastic, but for anyone else that happens to read this and doesn’t know for some reason. Kubernetes, Chromium, Android, Go, TensorFlow, Dart, Angular, many more that I can’t recall off the top of my head or ever heard of. Then all the research they publish, transformer, map reduce, bigtable, spanner, again the list goes on. I don’t know what companies I’d rate as high as Google in terms of ope…

Just to be clear, that wasn't a judgment value either way from my side.

This being said I would expect they contribute a lot for ffmpeg, which was mentioned explicitly, since this is such a critical building block for them.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#149

Post by fungusmind »

ho_schi wrote: post #105
oytis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is civil servants developing OSS commodities too much of a heresy I see two problems here for Germany. First, the salaries of civil servants are regulated, and might be not what most developers, even German ones, expect. In addition civil servant status is bundled with privileges and duties that make it painful to lay it down. Most developers are used to job flexibility though, especially as, as I said, the salarie…

I agree on the second point. I assume we all know that this weird EU free market religion is harmful. The EU would be 1000% better for us, without the economy stuff it was originally build upon. Free markets are dysfunctional and never fair. How we now? Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta proof it every day. The US and China don’t even care about fairness. Why they should? Someone mentioned above the limited money…

Free markets do not exist. The company becomes the government. The government becomes a company. Citizens become consumers.

Even Adam Smith knew that.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#150

Post by LtWorf »

phoghed wrote: post #147
LtWorf wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do? Anything meaningful?

I assume you’re being sarcastic, but for anyone else that happens to read this and doesn’t know for some reason. Kubernetes, Chromium, Android, Go, TensorFlow, Dart, Angular, many more that I can’t recall off the top of my head or ever heard of. Then all the research they publish, transformer, map reduce, bigtable, spanner, again the list goes on. I don’t know what companies I’d rate as high as Google in terms of ope…

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