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@Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Post #1484289

2026-04-21 06:50 UTC

This is interesting, but I’m not convinced I would consider this to be anywhere close to Flatpak. From what I can see the only purpose of using bubblewrap here is the dependency isolation (without having to recompile the world ala Nix), but it feels misleading to even call it a sandbox. This mounts /home and /run into the sandbox chroot, which means that “sandboxed” applications can do things like reading your SSH keys, dumping your keyring or writing to .bashrc (a.k.a. most of the attacks you’d want to prevent). This is presumably done because /home access you wouldn’t be able to write to the filesystem and without /run access you can’t even display a graphical window, which would make the packages quite useless. XDG Desktop Portal solves this by allowing filtered dbus access controlled by package metadata (/.flatpak-info), and then having sandboxed applications use portals to access files, secrets and other resources. That’s a major flaw in Flatpaks design (note that the most popular Flatpaks all want /home access), but it’s also what allows Flatpak to be useful.

Replies (2)

  • @nobody_1677@lemmy.world 2026-04-21 11:26

    Correct, that’s what I meant by calling it a lightweight sandbox that’s mainly used to isolate dependencies. Though the cool thing about cold brew is that it’s simply a shell script. Not even a crazy long one at that. It would not be difficult to modify the bubblewrap flags to increase security. Though filesystem isolation is not its goal, it’s meant to emulate that homebrew use which is unsandboxed.

    Open ##1493213

  • @excel@lemming.megumin.org 2026-04-21 15:17

    So in other words, it fixes all of the shit that makes Flatpak broken and useless?

    Open ##1498581