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Comment by colonial | Hacker News Reader

Defaulting to Android-style nanny sandboxing ("you can't grant access to your Downloads folder because we say so" etc.) is unlikely to go over well with the average Linux distro userbase.

Also, maximally opt-in sandboxes for graphical applications have been possible for a while. Just use Podman and only mount your Wayland socket + any working files.

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>Defaulting to Android-style nanny sandboxing ("you can't grant access to your Downloads folder because we say so" etc.) is unlikely to go over well with the average Linux distro userbase.

If you market it that way. Plenty of Linux users say they care about security, don't want maleware, etc. This is a step towards those desires. Users have been conditioned to use tools badly to designed for security for decades so there will be some growing pains, but it will get worse the longer people wait.

>Just use Podman and only mount your Wayland socket + any working files.

This won't work for the average user. Security needs to be accessible.

> Just use Podman and only mount your Wayland socket + any working files.

If only it was that simple…

Why isn't it?

All files pokes a big hole, really you want portals. You probably also want audio. And perhaps graphics acceleration depending on the software, and other limited hardware access. And dbus (but sandboxed proxy access). Probably some global config from the host as well (fonts, themes, cursor). And…well maybe there’s more but the point is it depends on the software. Maybe it is that simply sometimes. Often it’s not for non-trivial applications.

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