this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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This problem has been solved by Nix and Guix. Nix is as popular among developers as flatpak is. Add bubblewrap to all applications, and you get nearly all the features as flatpaks. Flatpaks, meanwhile are huge and a bit slow to start - problems that Nix and Guix don't suffer from.
I do use flatpaks extensively. But they are probably not the best solution to the problems you mention.>
Tbh, for me the value of flatpak is in the isolation (great for how easy it is to achieve), rather than the compatibility.
For example, I run obsidian with no network access and fs access to just the path where my notes are stored. This is really reassuring considering I am not really sure what all the plugins might do. While it is not perfect, it's much better than having it running natively in my box (I.e. root namespaces).
Isolation is easy to achieve. Flatpak's sandboxing layer is bubblewrap. It's an independent software. It wouldn't be too hard to write a wrapper for bubblewrap that acts like flatpak and launches applications in a carefully constructed sandbox.
It's also not too hard to cook a Dockerfile for it, or even write a systemd wrapper with security settings. However, with flatpak you get this out of the box and mostly in a transparent way, plus you get all the usually annoying aspects (like having GUI applications work in containers) taken care of.