clarity on firejail and flatpaks.

[Madmogone]

Hi all, seeking clarity on using firejail.I have been reading that the new flatpaks come ready sandboxed when downloaded, so if I download firejail for sandboxing firefox, will firejail conflict with any flatpak programs that I install or should it make no difference?. Also is it safe to download firejail from the soureforge site as I have read that they sometimes add things to programs, this was from an article about two years ago in the linux format mag?.I look forward to all replies.Cheers.

[Fred Barclay]

G'day Madmogone!
flatpaks come with a sandbox called "bubblewrap" that doesn't have as many features as firejail, so adding firejail is always a good idea in my opinion.

Firejail from the sourceforge site is safe to the very best of my knowledge. Firejail is also available in the Mint 18.x repositories, so you can install it with sudo apt install firejail - however, it's a much older version that works but doesn't have all the features of the current version. If you know that you'll check the sourceforge site regularly for updates (I believe you can use RSS for this), you should be fine installing from there. Else, I'd recommend you stick to the version in the repositories so that you always get security updates.

It's not at all difficult to compile firejail from source if you don't want to trust SourceForge. I can help with this if you like.

Cheers!
Fred

[JoeFootball]

If you know that you'll check the sourceforge site regularly for updates ...

For this very thing, I use a free VisualPing account to automatically check the FireJail Release Notes page for changes, and it emails me when it does.

Joe

[Pjotr]

Firejail isolates your personal folder (with only a few unavoidable exceptions) from the applications running in Firejail. flatpaks outside of Firejail, have full access to your personal folder....

[Madmogone]

Hi all, sorry for not responding sooner, but I have had a busy weekend.I think I am going to just install firejail from the repositories (18xxx) for now and just get the security updates.Will check whether flatpaks are covered with firejail before I install any at any time.Is it better to install firejail from the software manager or from the cli?. I look forward to your replies. Cheers all.

[Pjotr]

Is it better to install firejail from the software manager or from the cli?.

Same thing.