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verified publisher icon tchx84

`host` and `host-os` perms are confusing for inexperienced users

Open gasinvein opened this issue 4 years ago • 3 comments

Flatseal is a convenient tool with friendly UI, making it appealing for inexperienced users. However, flatpak permissions are not friendly and often confusing for such users. This causes such users to make wrong assumptions and misuse Flatseal.

Many times I've seen people assuming that host-os and host permissions, once allowed, will enable them to use OS-provided programs and libraries, which isn't the case. My suggestion is to hide host-os/host-etc perms, since they're not useful to the end users anyway, and reword host permission description in a way that it would be obvious that the permission won't enable you to use OS components within Flatpak sandbox.

gasinvein avatar Dec 01 '21 13:12 gasinvein

I don't really like that removing permissions would be the way to go, instead, we should think of how to improve these descriptions and clarify these distinctions on the offline documentation.

tchx84 avatar Dec 04 '21 14:12 tchx84

I don't like it either, but I'm afraid the descriptions will be just ignored. A logical question from a user - why introduce a host-os permission if it doesn't allow you to use the host OS? Maybe the "advanced" permissions could be hidden behind some "expert mode" switch?

gasinvein avatar Dec 04 '21 16:12 gasinvein