Comment by bboozzoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bboozzoo | Hacker News Reader

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> Snap has the abysmally named "--classic" parameter to allow installs to "run without confinement".

Only if the snap was built with classic confinemnt in mind. Otherwise, just slapping --classic on a random snap does nothing, there's even a warning display about that. Classic is very much the same as a random 3rd party vendor app built and unpacked under /opt. Unfortunately some software, especially IDEs and languages are unsuitable for running under confinement and need to be distributed this way. By passing --classic you give your consent to use an app package in this sub-par way.

FWIW, perhaps you meant --devmode, which as the name implies is mostly for developing a snap? snap install --help describes that as:

    --devmode  Put snap in development mode and disable security confinement

> especially IDEs and languages are unsuitable for running under confinement and need to be distributed this way

I think the solution to that should be something other than removing the sandbox. I see "portals" referred to elsewhere in this thread w.r.t. flatpak; does snap not have similarly?

> By passing --classic you give your consent to use an app package in this sub-par way.

Sure, but it's a terrible name. It should be --unsandboxed or --fullaccess. "Classic" sounds like a mode you'd want.

> I think the solution to that should be something other than removing the sandbox. I see "portals" referred to elsewhere in this thread w.r.t. flatpak; does snap not have similarly?

Snaps use portals like flatpaks do. The problem is more about frameworks you build applications with not being ready to consume portals. Turns out only some reasonably recent Qt versions can work with portals. IIRC Electron only landed support couple of months ago. Back on the host side of confinement, you need to run a reasonably recent xdg-desktop-portal (and a maching GUI integration bit). Some old distros do not provide any of those packages or ship version that don't work, so things are DOA.

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