this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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No. If you put a warning on every app (except for the most trivial ones that don't actually do anything useful) then the warnings mean nothing. The become something more than ass-covering legal(ish) BS.
Apps could start improving to remove the warnings…
What do you mean by "improving"? This alarming warning appears because Firefox requires permissions. Let us look at the permissions listed there:
App permissions should not be about "this app cannot be trusted because it asks for scary scary permissions". They should be about "take a look at the list of permissions the app requests and determine whether or not it make sense for such an app to need such permissions".
To 1.:
dri
instead ofall
would handle hardware-accelerated rendering. Then some webcams or controllers won't be accessible though. This one's a bit complicated, since the necessary portals for e.g. generic USB device access aren't yet there.To 2.: portals should be used instead of that. Using them doesn't require these permissions.
To 3.: click on details and see. This is Flathub making it easy to understand for users.
Permissions should make clear whatever dangerous things an app can do. If not, why do all this effort of isolation? Firefox could delete everything in downloads, either by accident on Mozilla's side, or a privilege escalation. If the app used portals instead, it couldn't, at least without user interaction. Or a browser security vulnerability could open up any USB devices to webpages. It's all about what could happen with granted permissions. And these can 100 % be fixed in at least some way.