Folks will reply "but I use it every day without plugins".
That position disregards software usability as a formal discipline, along with decades of UX research and standards.
Because in general, "usable" means "people use it". Which they do for Obsidian without community plugins without issues.
Obsidian Plugins are still incredibly vulnerable. A compromised plugin will essentially take over your machine. There's no sandboxing of any kind. It's even more insecure than browser extensions (that could steal your auth tokens, but at least don't have unfettered access to your filesystem).
This is really unfortunate. I love Obsidian and am a paid subscriber for many years, but the community plugins needs a security overhaul asap, before someone gets hurt.
If you're running GNU/Linux, chances are you'll have hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of software that run totally unsandboxed.
Yes, a very small minority of applications are unfortunately primarily distributed via flatpak or snap, and the distributors don't care about the user experience, so it's error-ridden and problem-ridden, but chances are you can get a "normal computer program" version of it unencumbered by such grossness.
Besides. They said "all software on your machine". That is trivially false, to a significant degree.
Sandboxing, at least in the sense of easily configurable access with default deny on most even somewhat sensitive things: agreed, sandboxing is fairly uncommon in general, definitely not a majority on most systems. When ignoring the elephant in the room: mobile OSes.
A majority run as me, a minority run with root privileges.
> I think that's fairly safe to say, given that new system installs often have hundreds of processes already running.
Precisely! Those hundreds of pre installed processes are running without sandboxing, or any access control beyond what Obsidian has.
For example, did you know you can just `ls` a directory, or `cat` a file, and both of those applications will run with full, unsandboxed, unrestricted access as you? And there are countless preinstalled applications just like those.
- Home folder read/write access
- System folder media
- System folder mnt
- Microphone access and audio playback
- And more...
The Obsidian snap [1] is installed with the --classic flag, which also grants access to the whole home directory, but at least you have to consciously specify the --classic flag to grant this permission.
Flatpak could of course be significantly better... but it's still a massive step in a better direction.
flatpacks have access to all my files, they would be useless without. And they are the only sensitive files in my computers
All I want is a top-notch Markdown editor with a mobile app and trustworthy sync, and that's what Obsidian gives me. And if ever Obsidian goes away or is enshittified, I'll still have a perfectly good folder of Markdown documents that I can take elsewhere.
I really don't want my notes on other people's servers so the official sync will never be an option unless they enable that to be self hosted as an option.
Seriously though, I agree with your sentiment that community plugin security can and needs to be improved, but how does someone saying they use it every day "disregard software usability as a formal discipline, along with decades of UX research and standards"
It's horse hockey. Plenty users use the vanilla Obsidian.
> Folks will reply "but I use it every day without plugins".
Because they do. You're saying that they should lie about their usage to fit your narrative?
They are irrelevant for this dispute, because these problems do not concern them. And the amount of people using plugins because of some real demand is not low.
The parent comment says that Obsidian is not usable without plugins and it's simply nonsense. It would be very charitable to call this a "dispute."
Could Obsidian handle plugin permission better? I guess so. But that doesn't mean the users have to use plugins. It's ultimately the user's choice. Blender has zero security guards over the addons besides the OS's and the ecosystem thrives. So does Minecraft. These communities are essentially "arbitrary Python/Java code goes brrrr."
The discussion about the plugin-system, and the people who need it to which degree.
> The parent comment says that Obsidian is not usable without plugins and it's simply nonsense.
Sure, fair. But the comment happened in the context of talking about the plugin-system, and parent comment seems on the side that for them obsidian is worthless without plugins. Saying that other people have no need for them is pointless, because they are not in the picture. Phrasing could indeed be better, but talking about people who are not concerned by the problem is not really adding anything to the discussion.
The disagreement was because the actual claim made was far broader, and in that far broader context, opposite to reality. We can assume good faith and an honest mistake in wording, but we can also forgive respondents for reasonably taking the words at face value.
This combination of software relying on third parties without security seems to be untenable. Personally I've gotten rid of just about as many extensions as I can anywhere and switched to batteries included software.
If you install a dozen mini-apps from random developers you never heard about, you can't complain if one is malware.
Krita also has a plugin system based on Python. Any "plugin" has the same level of access as running a python script.
Personally I blame operating systems for not providing a way to isolate how programs interact with user files.
WoW's whole UI is built in the same Lua environment as add-ons, and Blizzard has implemented some interesting restrictions (like the taint system[0]) to prevent add-ons from completely automating gameplay.
0. https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Secure_Execution_and_Tainti...
You simply can't expect every software that wants a plugin system to have the same security practices as the most used software in the world.
In fact, there are many reasons why you might want a plugin to have full filesystem and internet access, such as batch processing or simply adding things directly from webpages. Sandboxing this will just make plugins less useful.
In the end it's a problem of trust. You're installing software from untrustworthy developers because you trust the name of the application those plugins are associated with.
You could fix the problem in Obsidian, but the same problem will happen in other software. Some of which simply can't justify bothering with sandboxing plugins. This is just the way plugins are.
I'm not saying that I think they should, or that I expect them to. I'm saying that it's one particular implementation of sandboxing that has a bunch of interesting properties, and that makes it worth studying.
I'm somewhat convinced that taint-influenced capabilities is a good future model to pursue. Computers are fast, I'm fairly confident that it chould be done at whole-computer scale and still be reasonable... though probably not with a million electron apps. Which is likely a good thing in aggregate (I say as a fan of web tech and the very compelling features such things offer. Great for minor or PoC, not for major pieces of software).
0. https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Secure_Execution_and_Tainting
1. https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Wowpedia:About_the_wiki#Bac...
There are of course complications, costs, and downsides associated with doing that. It might not be worth it currently, or performance costs might be too high, or the community might be overwhelmingly using abandoned plugins that won't be updated, etc. It's still a decision to remain complacent until forced by attacks though, it's well beyond common knowledge that these things happen so you can't really call it ignorance.