I switched off of BSD about a decade ago so I can’t weigh in on it’s current state at all. I generally avoid Flatpaks at least in Qubes. I do have a template that supports it but it’s only running on my Music VM currently which is offlined, the rest follow the traditional template+AppVM approach which I keep updated on a schedule.
I have never operated under the assumption that flatpaks are sandboxed or secure because they really aren’t. It’s a system to bundle packages with your software without contaminating the host environment. The big issue really is in the package maintainers shipping outdated packages, containers were never a security measure in my eyes due to the shared kernel and especially not with the default share of the homedir for flatpaks. If you need that kind of isolation you really need a VM. I treat them as a standard install personally without any expectations of isolation, and really with Silverblue I’m leaning more towards installing apps directly in Distrobox and exporting them to the host, it still has the shared homedir issue but you’re getting up to date packages in a desired environment that you fully control (this is both good and bad since maintenance is on you).
I think it’s a good idea if there were stricter requirements, maybe vulnerability scanning as a requirement to releasing and pulling stale flatpaks after a period of no releases to start. It’s difficult to appease everyone in this situation and breaking changes would be inevitable so it is difficult to fully solve now that it already exists as it does. I do think supply chain attacks will only get more common though so they definitely need work.
So what about FreeBSD? And did you read up on Flatpak having security issues because the containerization is supposedly not sufficient?
I switched off of BSD about a decade ago so I can’t weigh in on it’s current state at all. I generally avoid Flatpaks at least in Qubes. I do have a template that supports it but it’s only running on my Music VM currently which is offlined, the rest follow the traditional template+AppVM approach which I keep updated on a schedule.
I have never operated under the assumption that flatpaks are sandboxed or secure because they really aren’t. It’s a system to bundle packages with your software without contaminating the host environment. The big issue really is in the package maintainers shipping outdated packages, containers were never a security measure in my eyes due to the shared kernel and especially not with the default share of the homedir for flatpaks. If you need that kind of isolation you really need a VM. I treat them as a standard install personally without any expectations of isolation, and really with Silverblue I’m leaning more towards installing apps directly in Distrobox and exporting them to the host, it still has the shared homedir issue but you’re getting up to date packages in a desired environment that you fully control (this is both good and bad since maintenance is on you).
I think it’s a good idea if there were stricter requirements, maybe vulnerability scanning as a requirement to releasing and pulling stale flatpaks after a period of no releases to start. It’s difficult to appease everyone in this situation and breaking changes would be inevitable so it is difficult to fully solve now that it already exists as it does. I do think supply chain attacks will only get more common though so they definitely need work.