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I think developers of desktop application are generally open towards facilitating sandboxing though. Most applications use standard XDG folders for files, use s

I think developers of desktop application are generally open towards facilitating sandboxing though. Most applications use standard XDG folders for files, use standard toolkit file pickers, etc. I don't have hard data, but my impression is that the general tendency in Flatpaks is that they are able to do more sandboxing over time. When Flatpak was new, a lot of applications pretty much required completely opening their sandboxes, the same applications have much more limited privileges nowadays. It's a long process, but at least with desktop applications there is progress. Unfortunately, the same can't really be said about command-line tools and development tools (NPM, cargo, pip, editor plugins, etc.).

fc417fc802 2y ago
I'm not even sure what it would look like for CLI tools. Probably the sanboxing tools themselves need better controls and better UX for those controls. For CLI a solution would probably look a lot like unshare or (a more user friendly version of) setcap. The user would need to reach out to the sandbox to communicate what additional things to permit during this specific session. And then inevitably someone would configure the equivalent of passwordless sudo at which point I wonder what the point of the whole thing was to begin with. Related, we need a better paradigm for CLI to differentiate between user versus programmatically generated input. A program shouldn't be able to impersonate me unless I explicitly granted it some extremely unusual privileges.