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I'm also curious about the actual usecases. This seems very highly niche.

This can also lead to security issues, as it encourages the use of shared folders or USB drives for carrying around executables. You should never reuse executables from other systems - always download one from the first party.

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What is it with USB drives that bothers you people so much? It's just storage. Apps could also come from a cloud drive, which would be no more dangerous.

All I hear is "ewww, physical media!"

It's not about USB. It's about executables, and syncing-over-cloud is equally dangerous w/ executables. Perhaps, syncing is worse than USB, because it will write executables right into your home directory, which isn't mounted with NOEXEC flag, where USB would be mounted with it by default (depending on the policy).

Security-wise, copying executables b/w systems amplifies the risk of escalating partial write access on one system to full system access on many other systems. This would be an easy building block for "Advanced Persistent Threat"[1] attacks.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat

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