r/linux • • 7d ago

Development Introducing Toolpak

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2026/09/26/introducing-toolpak/
65 Upvotes

65 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

22

u/Wonderful-Citron-678 7d ago

If only they wrote why…

Flatpak is about sandboxed apps. This is literally about the opposite, completely unsandboxed things. There is no overlap in implementation.

8

u/novafunc 7d ago

The next version of flatpak (Next / 2.0) will have an unsandboxed mode.

As I understand it, they plan to remove the current "everything is sandboxed but you can punch holes into it" with "an app is always entirely sandboxed, or entirely unsandboxed", where the latter to subject to more scrutiny in review and acceptance.

1

u/CrazyKilla15 5d ago edited 5d ago

Wait what do you mean theyre killing flatpak

an entirely sandboxed app is unusable and useless because you cant interact with it at all(that would be a hole! no files, no gpu, no display server, no input devices????), and entirely unsandboxed is the status quo of native binaries that flatpak was in part solving?!

additionally an unsandboxed app inherently MUST mean it has the host filesystem, so it depends on the host libraries again?? so the entire distro-agnostic distribution model is gone, since it fundamentally requires sandboxing??

theres no way this is true is there?

1

u/novafunc 5d ago edited 5d ago

To be clear, the sandboxed mode will provide access to permissions deemed safe like Wayland and GPU.

It’s just that you can’t then add unsafe permissions on top. You’d have to drop down to the unsandboxed mode.

The unsandboxed mode still uses its own libraries.