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This article is written in bad faith. RE: The sandbox is a lie. No it's not. The technical capabilities are there. The problem is that the application needs t

by Iolaum 6y ago

This article is written in bad faith. RE: The sandbox is a lie. No it's not. The technical capabilities are there. The problem is that the application needs to be written a certain way in order for the sandbox to be enforced and the app not to break. This is a not a technical problem but a political and resource one. Meaning how do you incentivize developers to re-write their apps so that they are compatible with that. Given that there are very few money to be made in linux applications I can see why developers are not rushing to re-write. Hence flatpak's allow for an escape hatch on the sandbox so existing apps continue to work. Even Google, with all of it's influnce on the android ecosystem, and all the money involved in it had to back off on scoped storage last year because of the developer outcry. Flatpak is moving towards the right direction. But because of lack of resources it 'll take more time to get there. RE: You are NOT getting security updates Again the author mixes technical capability with the limitations of a volunteer driven ecosystem to arrive to a bad conclusion. In 99% of cases flatpaks are provided by third party volunteers. They have no obligation to stop their life in order to test and provide timely updates. This is also true for normal deb/rpm packages by the way. Maintainers of complex packages such as calibre are unsung heroes. However flatpak's architecture allows for software vendors to host their own repositories and it's easy for the user's to subscribe to them. Hence if a software vendor wants to provide timely updates to their users the capability is there and waiting. RE: Local root exploit? Minor issue! Hello Nitpicking. thayne did a better job than I could do in their post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23523887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23523887). At the end of the day an update was provided for the users addressing this. As a user I don't care about how the update was sold. I saw an update available and I updated my system. TLDR: Flatpak technical capabilites are fine (or working towards the right direction). The ecosystem does not have the resources to emberace those capabilities fast enough and that's been used to diminish the technical work been done.

pie_flavor 6y ago
This is a tool. How good it is, is measured by how useful it is to me. If it does not provide something I need it to do, then it's less good for it. If it fails to provide the services it advertised as providing, then it's straight-up bad. I don't care why this happens. Might be technical, might be political, might be resource based. Doesn't matter. The tool either does what I need it to or doesn't. And flatpak does not provide sandboxing or security updates, and that it doesn't do this is independent of whether it's a technical or non-technical problem.
- Iolaum 6y ago
  It's one thing to criticise flatpaks on the grounds of not getting the job done because nobody uses it properly and another to say there's no sandbox.

by Iolaum 6y ago

pie_flavor 6y ago

This is a tool. How good it is, is measured by how useful it is to me. If it does not provide something I need it to do, then it's less good for it. If it fails to provide the services it advertised as providing, then it's straight-up bad. I don't care why this happens. Might be technical, might be political, might be resource based. Doesn't matter. The tool either does what I need it to or doesn't. And flatpak does not provide sandboxing or security updates, and that it doesn't do this is independent of whether it's a technical or non-technical problem.

Iolaum 6y ago
It's one thing to criticise flatpaks on the grounds of not getting the job done because nobody uses it properly and another to say there's no sandbox.