Linux

Just downloading anything from anywhere sets one up for failure/malware.

Reducing the size of the OS helps a ton here.

And mounting home read-only. I think Android and ChromeOS do that. I will experiment with that too, it is really interesting. You mainly need a different place to store user scripts, and appimages are broken (how sad), the rest should be fine.

Then a few more core concepts help too:

• KISS (keep it stupid simple)
• Unix philosophy (everything does one thing and stays transparent)
• and the concept of least privilege (seccomp, MAC (mandatory access control, SELinux/Apparmor, sandboxes, jails, etc).

Flatpak helps a ton centralizing the packaging efforts. And it works. There are tons of officially supported packages. And I guess many of them will be maintained upstream.

But you still have a secure system, sandboxing, verification and packagers that keep an eye on it, kind of.

On a secure system you would need to pay a lot of people, like the typical 3-5 people that package most apps. For doing security analyses, opting-in to every new update etc.

~/Applications is no a random place, it comes from macos.

Hahaha I would call that VERY random. It is problematic that the default xdg directories are hidden.

And I just learned that you can just source scripts into bash and thus being executable or not doesnt matter. What an incredible design flaw... at least this just works with some binaries, I guess?

You mean appimagetool

No the Flatpak Appimage Pool. But a solution to easily package a bunch of files sounds really awesome. I miss that for RPMs, sddm2rpm did this kind of.

appman

Very interesting tool. So this is for appimages but also binaries?

I am a bit confused, especially as they state to prefer official releases, which for me means tarballs.

But a very good concept.

Interesting set of apps you have there. And ironically I have to agree they are small. Flatpak libraries are too huge and the deduplication doesnt work if it us not used for downloads and if there are dozens of runtimes.

A modular approach would be very much needed, instead of a damn KDE runtime that is nearly the entire desktop.

But I have some questions.

Yes that's aisap sandbox

Thats not a sandbox, its a nice wrapper for firejail, at least what they write. I only knew some Github issue where they discussed this, and because Appimages require fuse they couldnt be sandboxed with bubblewrap.

Then they say "bubblewrap is used in Flatpak" but no comment if THEY also use it.

Firejail is the setuid binary I talked about, they likely have fixed their security issues but bubblewrap/bubblejail are probably better as they dont need setuid binaries.

If Appimages are possible to sandbox with bubblewrap, that would for sure be cool.

I also found rustysnakes crabjail, dont know the state it is in, but that is a possible candidate for replacing bubblejail.

right now its biggest limitation is that a sandboxed appimage can't launch another sandboxed appimage.

No idea if Flatpaks can do that. But I would say the biggest issue is that the big vendors just put their appimage on some file server without any data on the sandbox.

Flatpak is way better here, where the sandbox is checked BEFORE apps are successfully submitted. And there are warnings etc.

And, of course, every app is sandboxed, not just a few.

those menus rely on desktop entries in $XDG_DATA_HOME/Applications.

Not the "create new" to my knowledge. That is in $XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR but I am currently struggling to make Flatpaks use that.

AppImage is just a format, same as a deb or rpm

Yes, so is Flatpak. But Appimages were introduced to be Windows-like. Sure there are companies that dont care and publish random rpms on their website too.

But with Appimages that is the only way as there is no real repo. AppMan is a cludge here, bundling together tons of different sources, kind of like Obtainium.

https://github.com/AppImageCommunity/AppImageUpdate

That tool is either completely finished or kind of abandoned.

Interesting, didnt know they have a signature builtin. That would also be useful.

That zsync2 thing explained in AppMan was just like delta updates. If a malicious actor has access to the old appimage and the fileserver, they can produce the correct zsync2 thing and the updates work, until signature verification is enforced.

I like to keep all the software that I need in my home, because that way I don't depend on what my distro provides.

As I said, as long as bash script.sh works with nonexecutable stuff, noexec home is pretty worthless. Just another layer of defence.

You mean the APK itself does the signature verification or what?

No, android APKs are like Distro packages, they can be sideloaded however you want and then are forwarded to the "session installer" (on modern android), which is the "package manager" of android.

That installer saves the signature somewhere, and from then on you can only update the APK if the signature was made with the same private key.

Found out you can also not sign APKs, which happened here. I honestly dont know if more developers dont sign their APKs.

I will update my repo text to get to the current state of facts.