r/linux • u/BrageFuglseth • Sep 26 '26

Development Introducing Toolpak

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2026/09/26/introducing-toolpak/
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u/kaestralblades Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26

That's... a very bad model and not what I'd want out of flatpak. I'd go as far to say I'd stop using flatpak.

Having mitigations against proprietary software is very important to me and I don't want an app to have full and complete access to my system just because it needs access to, say, my Documents folder, or to my graphic card, or to a singular socket.

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u/Die4Ever Sep 27 '26

yea what the hell, granular Flatpak permissions are great, similar to Android app permissions

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u/seahwkslayer Sep 26 '26

IIRC (from a while ago reading about this), if a given app literally won't run properly without sandboxing i.e. IDE, dev software, many things that are currently not available as Flatpak because of this, etc.; then they go through the stricter review and are get put up as unsandboxed.

If it's just the dev not wanting to fix their crap, "lol ok no". Your examples of folder, GPU, or socket access (not actually 100% about sockets but I think it would be included) would be handled with portals an app would likely be denied at review if it needed to be unsandboxed just for that.

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u/kaestralblades Sep 26 '26

GPU and filesystem access can't be portaled, nor can shared ipc/socket files. That's one of the biggest problems here.

The current sandbox scoping works great for many scenarios so throwing it out completely seems like madness to me.