So far I have 3 snap installed apps and none of them allow access to my home dot folders. One of the important ones is KDE Kate text editor. I removed and reinstalled it using APT though its the older version 19 (probably intentional by Canonical) to discourage installing through APT.
Although I like the concept, the restrictions placed are unacceptable. I will not make copies of all my .local and .config and other dot folders to edit.
Maybe I am using it wrong. But unless this weirdness with blocking access to dot home folders is fixed, I am really done with Snaps. Heck I may even look at other distributions if the intent here is to take over my laptop.
I would also like a way to access ANY folders if I choose on my File System when I run an app. Something that enables / disables by the user. Can you please do that?
Thanks
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The home security confinement interface disallows the snap to access hidden files right under the user’s home directory. This is, for example, to prevent the application to steal critical information (private keys($HOME/.ssh/id_rsa), command history($HOME/.bash_history), etc.) and upload it to a publisher controlled remote server while gaining access to other regular files in your home directory.
The problem of losing access, though, can be mitigated by the introduction of the Desktop Portals, however it requires software stack and OS support and will need time to be incorporated into every snap on every system.
This is exactly NOT the case as Ubuntu (as well as many non rolling-release distributions) practice Feature Freeze that stops introducing new upstream software releases during its development cycle and focuses on fixing bugs found on the current version.
Snaps, in fact, is a solution to mitigate this problem as it offers user alternatives to use recent (but may be unstable) software releases on one’s need.
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Note that it’s recommended for IDE’s to use classic confinement, which allows them access any file on the host system. It might be useful to report a bug about this to the Kate developers.
I think it would be useful if the Snap UI was user friendly with regard to confinement options but also attribution of the store apps’ source/maintainers. Makes it harder to find its’s github or website and read up on it about a store app before installation.
I used --devmode and --info and other options from command line to install kate for example so I can edit dot folder files.
For some reason it installs t .desktop files.
env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/kate_kate.desktop /snap/bin/kate -b %U
env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/kate_org.kde.kate.desktop /snap/bin/kate -b %U
A diff shows some differences in languages and an Icon entry.
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Please report those bugs to the Kate bugtracker.
Installing using devmode should not be necessary; Kate should be using classic confinement. This is something the publishers need to change. Snap publishers can include metadata to point users to their bugtrackers and websites, but not all publishers fill those in.
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Awesome! Seems like they aren’t using gitlab for bugs yet. Feel free to post a link to the issue on the old bugtracker when you create it.
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. Thanks!