Comment by spaniard89277 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaniard89277 | Hacker News Reader

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Snap gives all kind of headaches. I remember trying VSCode and I had problems working with files normally. I asked for help and I got quite a bit of backlash because I didn't wan't to deal with another layer of configuring a system just to access to my local files, and even after that you won't get the same experience.

But apparently I'm some bastard n00b that does not care about security enough! Can you imagine trying to access your files from your editor like you've been doing for decades? This guy doesn't get it!

Apparently flatpak et al have the same problems.

In my case, I'm not sure where to switch. I want easy of use, I don't really enjoy meddling with the OS. I use Xubuntu because it works better out of the box for me, but if I have to deal with this, I'm not interested.

I don't know what kind of hoops Snap require to access files. Flatpak, however, has a pretty simple system for a fully sandboxed app to open a file or a directory: it just opens a file or directory picker, you pick a file or directory, and the app gets access to that file or directory without getting access to anything outside what you picked. Behind the scenes this is done via the XDG Portal system, but that's irrelevant to the end user who only sees a normal file open dialog.

Then for apps that have dotfile-type directories where you can put config files and other stuff, those simply exist in app-specific directories under .var in your home directory, so they're not difficult to find either.

Snaps use exactly the same system with the same underlying APIs. An app that uses XDG Portals will work seamlessly when packaged as a snap, too.

> Flatpak, however, has a pretty simple system for a fully sandboxed app to open a file or a directory: it just opens a file or directory picker, you pick a file or directory, and the app gets access to that file or directory without getting access to anything outside what you picked.

Unfortunately that still breaks any kind of multi-file format, where opening one file might implicitly require accessing additional other files, and in some cases those additional files might even be distributed all over the directory hierarchy.

VSCode was the one that made me uninstall snapd on the installation image for our classroom...

Yeah, it's a mess. I guess that for other casual apps it's less hassle.

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