Flatpaks do better sandboxing. So better then .deb's, but not better then using a web browser
this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
47 points (98.0% liked)
Privacy
49082 readers
974 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
If you're overriding the default permissions.. Flatpaks attempt to sandbox applications not built to work in a sandbox so the packages usually come with lots of holes prepunched that you probably can close without issues.
Yeah use something flatseal to mess with further securing flatpaks
than*
Standard Debian packages have access to things like your home folder and other things that can be accessed without superuser level access. If you're not okay with that, don't install it.
If a flatpak package is available, it can have it's permissions controlled by Flatseal, allowing you to restrict Spotify's permissions.
I cant answer your question, but you could just use the webplayer.
Why not just use the web app?
The web app is (deliberately) limited in comparison to the desktop app.
Thanks, I think psst will be it
Thank you!
Either use flatpak or the web app I guess?
Ordinarily I’d recommend the Flatpak, but the Flatpak for Spotify literally just a wrapper around the snap package. That’s nasty.
buy your music
Just use Spotifys web interface.
On Linux, all unsandboxed apps are allowed to do anything your user account can do (without sudo) - there is no permission model. You could use Flatpaks but they're not perfect, likely would require customizing with Flatseal.
*without SELinux
But it's a pain to set up and I hate it
So that's like, reading all documents, writing stuff, and I assume it can also make outbound connections to servers?
you could use yt-dlp
Everyone hates snaps but a sandboxed snap also exists in addition to a flatpak.
I am mostly saying this simply to annoy people.
If you want to make sure your system stays 100% healthy do not try to install proprietary software on your Linux :)
I'm sure Spotify collects data on the running system, similar to the Steam hardware survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
They use that data to make decisions about how to develop their product. Does that make it unsafe to you?
You can run it in a vm 🤷♀️