I’m not proposing anything here, I’m curious what you all think of the future.
What is your vision for what you want Linux to be?
I often read about wanting a smooth desktop experience like on MacOS, or having all the hardware and applications supported like Windows, or the convenience of Google products (mail, cloud storage, docs), etc.
A few years ago people were talking about convergence of phone/desktop, i.e. you plug your phone into a big screen and keyboard and it’s now your desktop computer. That’s one vision. ChromeOS has its “everything is in the cloud” vision. Stallman has his vision where no matter what it is, the most important part is that it’s free software.
If you could decide the future of personal computing, what would it be?
Aside from all the things Flatpaks get right, a sandbox framework built right into the design is a major win and in my case, it’s one of the big reasons I went with it.
You can also modify the build script for any flatpak’s manifest and create packages with
flatpak-builder. May not be as easy as PKGBUILDs but it’s certainly possible.The problem of bad software defaults is easily solved with Flatseal. My point is that, it takes a few clicks to deny permissions to Flatpak applications as opposed to sandboxing a traditional app yourself.
Writing sandbox profiles for apparmor or something similar is usually a complex elaborate affair. And even when you do finally manage to get a working profile, it still requires maintenance to keep the sandbox functional as the target software updates. You won’t face any of these problems with Flatpak’s bubblewrap.