Flatpaks do better sandboxing. So better then .deb's, but not better then using a web browser
this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
48 points (98.0% liked)
Privacy
38196 readers
63 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
than*
If you're overriding the default permissions.. Flatpaks attempt to sandbox applications not built to work in a sandbox so the packages usually come with lots of holes prepunched that you probably can close without issues.
Yeah use something flatseal to mess with further securing flatpaks
On Linux, all unsandboxed apps are allowed to do anything your user account can do (without sudo) - there is no permission model. You could use Flatpaks but they're not perfect, likely would require customizing with Flatseal.
*without SELinux
But it's a pain to set up and I hate it
So that's like, reading all documents, writing stuff, and I assume it can also make outbound connections to servers?
Yep. Anything you could do on the terminal without typing a password.
If you want to make sure your system stays 100% healthy do not try to install proprietary software on your Linux :)
Standard Debian packages have access to things like your home folder and other things that can be accessed without superuser level access. If you're not okay with that, don't install it.
If a flatpak package is available, it can have it's permissions controlled by Flatseal, allowing you to restrict Spotify's permissions.
I cant answer your question, but you could just use the webplayer.
Why not just use the web app?
The web app is (deliberately) limited in comparison to the desktop app.
The only limitation I've seen is the inability to download for offline listening. Other than that, especially on Brave, I get fully ad-free listening without any issues aside from a couple seconds of pause in between where the ad breaks used to be.
Ah, well I wasn't able to add to a group playlist in the web app.
Maybe it's not as bad as I thought, idk.
Group playlist? I've never used that feature, but I know you can add things to playlists on the web version, and you can make those playlists public as far as I know.
Yeah, well it said I had to download the app in order to do that. It was the first time I've used Spotify in years, though, so maybe there's a workaround or something.
Ordinarily I’d recommend the Flatpak, but the Flatpak for Spotify literally just a wrapper around the snap package. That’s nasty.
Not answering your question directly but have you heard of Nuclear Music Player? It searches the Spotify API for track names and plays them from Youtube.
Exactly the type of answer I came looking for. beCause to Hell with proprietary drek. Happy to see other alternatives.
Just use it as a PWA from a Chromium browser. I run Spotify as a PWA in Brave and get free, ad-free music. It's the ideal way, IMO. Then again, I only use Spotify for discovery. I buy my CDs and Bandcamp albums, I will always prefer ownership over streaming.
Thank you!
Thanks, I think psst will be it
Either use flatpak or the web app I guess?
you could use yt-dlp
Just use Spotifys web interface.
buy your music
Everyone hates snaps but a sandboxed snap also exists in addition to a flatpak.
I am mostly saying this simply to annoy people.
You can run it in a vm 🤷♀️
I'm sure Spotify collects data on the running system, similar to the Steam hardware survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
They use that data to make decisions about how to develop their product. Does that make it unsafe to you?