And then, a Snap doesn't behave as the user expects (e.g. like a "native" application). And the first solution on stack-whatever, is to install it using the "--classic" switch. Whereupon, there goes your sandboxing.

The difference being that Snaps always run in a semi-encapsulated environment (a container), whereas the AUR just executes in whatever security context you're issuing commands from. PKGBUILDs are arbitrary shell scripts and they can do anything that the user executing them can do.

I'm not trying to defend the perception that Snaps are immune from malware, but there is a real difference in the default safety of a package off the Snap Store and the AUR.

If the application is trustworthy, it doesn't matter. If not, you should think twice about running it even in a container.

To be clear, I agree. Containers on Linux are very weak security boundaries and should not be considered safe sandboxes for untrusted or dangerous code. In fact, post-Spectre, only physically independent hardware unattached to the network should be considered a reasonably safe sandbox.

However, something is better than nothing, and it's just not true that there's no difference between running something from the AUR and running something in a "confined" snap. There is some crap in the way at least.

Good point. Though the fact that you read your PKGBUILDs before running them (you do read your PKGBUILDs, right?) at least compensates for this.

> Snaps always run in a semi-encapsulated environment (a container)

Even with the `--classic` switch?

I wasn't aware of the "classic" switch, looks like they added it early last year. They appear to call this "classic confinement mode", and it sounds like it functions essentially like a normal package manager, though they insist on saying it's a "relaxed security model" instead of "no additional security model at all", which appears to be the truth of the matter.

Their site claims that only pre-vetted Snaps can be distributed with "classic confinement", so that's something at least. If that's true, it would allow the comparison between Snaps and the AUR to hold -- Snaps would either be pre-vetted and akin to official package repositories, or unvetted but executed within containers (which is still not really an ironclad security guarantee, but better than nothing).

It is deeply sad to see something that supposedly exists to facilitate and promote a sandboxed distribution model give up and cop out so blatantly though. They should've just named the flag "--make-snaps-worthless-you-should-be-using-apt-instead".

Is there a technical reason to prefer "classic" snaps over packages from the official repos? It seems like the default install path may be different and the libraries/installed files possibly better segmented on the filesystem, but ultimately that's little consolation.