this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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I don't think the comparison with Canonical works here, because Canonical is not the one who creates / updates the packages. Plus the Snap packages are sandboxed and do not have root access.
Snap packages do a very poor job of sandboxing. Also snapd runs as root as in needs extra privileges to mount the loopback devices
Off course the package manager runs as root. I meant the packages itself does not. I mean every package manager for your system, including Flatpak, Apt, Pacman requires root. Snap packages are better sandboxed (on Ubuntu) than Flatpak or any other system packages.
Look, I don't like Snaps and they were one of the reasons why I switched away from Ubuntu after 13 years. But your argumentation doesn't work for me. If any of the applications updates a bad update, then it wouldn't make the system unbootable. Crowdstrike software on the other hand are closed source and they had privileges to do everything on your system, as it was installed as Kernel level access program. None of this is true for Snap packages that are auto updated, nor is it true for Flatpak packages.
I am not saying nothing can happen, but because Snap packages are updating itself automatically does not equal Canonical = Crowdstrike. Most packages are not even packaged up by Canonical.
Edit: I think if you continue with this narrative, it would really hurt Linux adoption for no reason. Because people not familiar would say Ubuntu=Linux=Crowdstrike. They don't even need to install into Crowdstrike to get a strike, they just need to use the most popular Linux distribution Ubuntu. I mean this is what you are basically suggesting.
Source?
System packages already use apparmor, i don't see a reason they could not be as sandboxed as snap, and i am not aware of a reason that flatpak has a worst sandbox.