How the itch.io app sandboxes games

github.com

18 points·elisee··3 comments

Context: http://itch.io/ is a place for publishing indie games and other creative stuff. There is no greenlight process like on Steam, people can share content very easily without gatekeepers.

(Disclosure: I know the devs pretty well but I'm submitting because I think it's interesting content for the HN audience)

They recently released a Steam-like app for browsing, installing & updating games. There's an awful lot of interesting stuff being done like https://itch.io/docs/butler/ (CLI tool for efficiently patching games with diffing for both upload & download).

The latest feature they added is experimental sandboxing which allows transparently running the games you download from itch.io as a separate restricted user / in a jail. The submission link details the research done to make it work.

More info here: https://itch.io/docs/itch/using/sandbox.html and https://github.com/itchio/itch/releases/tag/v18.0.0

I remember reading the other day in /r/sysadmin how a school initiative to teach with video games was completely thrown out because their was no way to sandbox Steam in such a way that it could be rolled out to school computers. Steam community was unhelpful and a lot of people were disappointed. Could be an interesting application of itch.io.

Hi! I'm Amos, the main developer behind the itch.io app. I'll check this thread for comments tomorrow, thanks for your attention!

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