Not for the average/casual user, which is why this post exists.
The average person will look at that and see the ‘!’ in a triangle and became scared of what it can do to their system, even though it has no more permissions than a system package. Alternatively, they will become desensitized and learn to ignore it, resulting in installing flatpacks from untrusted and unverified sources.
Overall, I just think the idea around having to sandbox all flatpaks is not a good idea. To give a concrete example, Librewolf is marked as “potentially unsafe” because it has access to the download folder, but if I want to use it to open a file that isn’t in “downloads” I have to use flatseal to give it extra permissions - it’s the worst of both worlds! Trying so hard to comply with flatpak guidelines that it gets in the way of doing things, and still not being considered safe enough.
I get what you mean. When updating Linux mint, the “This needs to get some additional packages too” window, relatively benign, has a big scary ⚠️/ /!\ on it.
Felt the need to explain to the person I was installing it for. “That’s totally normal, just look it over first and continue.”
…like, it’s gonna do that almost every time it updates, it doesn’t need to look scary. :|
a curse upon these distros for alarming people with such messages. they are meaningless and technically apply to every flatpak
They mean that the app has that permission. It is good that they let the user know the apps capabilities
Not for the average/casual user, which is why this post exists.
The average person will look at that and see the ‘!’ in a triangle and became scared of what it can do to their system, even though it has no more permissions than a system package. Alternatively, they will become desensitized and learn to ignore it, resulting in installing flatpacks from untrusted and unverified sources.
Overall, I just think the idea around having to sandbox all flatpaks is not a good idea. To give a concrete example, Librewolf is marked as “potentially unsafe” because it has access to the download folder, but if I want to use it to open a file that isn’t in “downloads” I have to use flatseal to give it extra permissions - it’s the worst of both worlds! Trying so hard to comply with flatpak guidelines that it gets in the way of doing things, and still not being considered safe enough.
I get what you mean. When updating Linux mint, the “This needs to get some additional packages too” window, relatively benign, has a big scary ⚠️/
/!\on it.Felt the need to explain to the person I was installing it for. “That’s totally normal, just look it over first and continue.”
…like, it’s gonna do that almost every time it updates, it doesn’t need to look scary. :|
You shouldn’t use Android then. It is way worse
It’s not the distros, it’s Flathub who provides those warnings.