Comment by amelius
5 days ago
My main problem with Linux is that I have to trust all the applications that I install (unless I am willing to do an extreme amount of sysadmin which I am not). On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
GUI apps often come in Flatpak[1] these days - which are sandboxed[2] like you are expecting. Flathub[3] is the primary place to get GUI apps, but many distros also have their own app store too.
Flatseal[4] is a GUI that allows you to mange the sandboxes/permissions. You can also manage them via cli if you prefer.
For CLI apps, you can use distrobox[5] or toolbx[6].
[1] https://flatpak.org/
[2] https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/basic-concepts.html#sandb...
[3] https://flathub.org/en
[4] https://flathub.org/en/apps/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal
[5] https://distrobox.it/
[6] https://containertoolbx.org/
If you use KDE Plasma (like with Fedora KDE or Kinoite), you do not need Flatseal, as the functionality is integrated into System Settings.
Great tip - I do use KDE but didn't know this. Always just reached for Flatseal - but the functionality being integrated is even better. Very cool.
> On a smartphone at least I can easily assign permissions to each app.
Those permission categories are so coarse grained as to be useless. In order to pause a media player when a call comes in I have to give the media player access to the phone app. Pure madness.
Flatpak gives you a lot of permission controls for GUI apps and you can similarly sandbox a lot of CLI tools with toolbx or distrobox.