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Comment by markshuttle | Hacker News Reader

Administration of the machine - installing and removing software- generally requires proof of admin rights at some stage. Using the apps daily does not require admin rights. That's quite sensible.

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I think you should be able to download a calculator app without admin approval when the application is self contained.

You need to write to a form of registry, there's no way to do that currently without proper privileges.

Granted for some applications there may not need to be heavy CAPS requirements, perhaps group membership is sufficient.

Maybe long-term (I don't know, not associated with snap development in anyway). There will be a way to install as a user, perhpas with all config under a ~/.snap dir or something. Until then....

They could just copy OSX's approach: a privileged system search-indexer daemon "discovers" new app bundles users have plopped onto the disk, and then it tells a privileged "Launch Services" daemon about those bundles, which extracts their metadata and sticks it into its registry. (This is why e.g. filetype associations for apps get registered on OSX the moment you extract the app to disk; or, more recently, the moment you de-quarantine the app from its internet origin.)

You can add .desktop files to .local/share/applications hust fine and the gnome registry is user-specific, not global.

Well, sure, but that's not currently the way it works. I'm sure the use of sudo could be designed away. I think it's worth mentioning that it's not just for desktop apps too, services have been ported too it as well as cli centric programs (in fact, I've personally only used those)

I was under the impression that Snap and Flatpak were similar in that they made it possible to run containerized, sandboxed apps without needing root privileges. Am I wrong?

Flatpak supports per-user app installations. Snap currently does not.

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