Flatpaks deduplicate everything - all flatpak apps and all flatpak runtimes installed on a machine agains each other. So if you specify the basic freedesktop.or

Flatpaks deduplicate everything - all flatpak apps and all flatpak runtimes installed on a machine agains each other. So if you specify the basic freedesktop.org runtime, it is effectively a no-op as pretty much everyone will have it already installed, due to most of the other runtimes being based on it and most flatpak apps needing a runtime. As for sandboxing with Flatpal - AFAIK this is all intentional for the time being. The authors have ckearly statet their initial effort targets app dependency isolation and app portability, not security just now. That is much harder to do without severely limitting useful applications in what they can do. I have encountered incomplete sandboxing systems that strived for security in past and it has not been a good experience. For example I had the onr and only official Ubuntu Touch tablet, which used a predecessor of the Snap technology. One day I wanted to show my friends a couple photos from a micro SD card. I put it in to the tablet, bit no photo viewing app could show photos from the card. Why ? Because back then you could only open files from outside of the apps sandbox one by one using a special system controlled dialog. Not really usable for hundreds of photos and forget about a text editor or an IDE. This is where I like Flatpak - it gives you all the goodies of app separation and portability without all the hassle of a strict but unfinished secure sandbox. You only need to make sure you are getting the software from thrusted sources. A I think that's something one should be doiny anyway, even with a strct sandbox - if it can't support basic app use cases, who knows what security holes have the authors left in it...