@cassidy @violetstone @soop there is a talk happening at GUADEC in a couple of hours about exactly this! 😊

floss.social/@gnome/1148970708…

GNOME

2025-07-22 13:16:07

🛡️ "State of Portals"
with Georges Stavracas at #GUADEC2025
📅 25 July 🕒 11:40 CEST 📍 Brescia

🚪 Georges covers the current state and future of XDG Desktop Portals—essential for modern app developers.

🔗 events.gnome.org/event/259/con…

#GNOME #XDG #Flatpak #Portals #Linux #FOSS

GUADEC 2025

Welcome to GUADEC 2025 GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a week of talks and workshops.

^{GNOME Events (Indico)}

@violetstone @soop for more background on the reality of the Flathub security model, I recommend reading this blog post; I wrote it to help explain it pretty in depth:

docs.flathub.org/blog/app-safe…

Flathub Safety: A Layered Approach from Source to User

With thousands of apps and billions of downloads, Flathub has a responsibility to help ensure the safety of our millions of active users.

^{Cassidy James Blaede (docs.flathub.org)}

@violetstone @soop Flatpak and GNOME do rely on runtime permissions in the form of Portals, similar to the permissions model on iOS and Android. There are a number of static permissions that had to exist to transition from an entirely unsandboxed model to a permissions model where we actually provide an API and user control over what apps can do.

flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-…

XDG Desktop Portal

XDG Desktop Portal allow Flatpak apps, and other desktop containment frameworks, to interact with the system in a secure and well defined way. This documentation covers everything you need to know ...

^{XDG Desktop Portal}

@violetstone yea

you already get the choices presented to you in a fairly straightforward manner if you install flatseal but even then you have to go out of your way to change the settings from the typically insane defaults