~/hideOS
menu
wiki/ Applications

$cat wiki/Applications.md

Applications

The image is the system’s; people do not install into it. Graphical applications come from Flatpak, and command-line and development tools are meant to live in containers. See ARCHITECTURE.md, “Applications and development”.

Everything on this page is in hideOS Workstation only. The recipes are in recipes/system/apps; ROADMAP H5 tracks what is done.

Flatpak

flatpak.toml, Flatpak 1.18.

  • One system-wide installation, in /var/lib/flatpak on @var, which members of wheel may change without a password (Flatpak’s own polkit rules), through flatpak-system-helper on the system bus.
  • Flathub is preconfigured with nothing in /etc. The recipe installs flathub.flatpakrepo into /usr/share/flatpak/remotes.d, and Flatpak applies every file there, with its GPG key, to the system installation the first time it opens it.
  • Sandboxes are the system’s bubblewrap and xdg-dbus-proxy, with Wayland’s security-context protocol, which COSMIC supports. bubblewrap is not setuid: it uses unprivileged user namespaces, so the kernel has CONFIG_USER_NS.
  • Applications are kept in libostree’s content-addressed store; ostree is built only for that, with nothing for booting an ostree system.
  • What a system without systemd does not use — Flatpak’s systemd units, its environment generators, the profile.d script — is left out; the COSMIC session puts the exported applications in XDG_DATA_DIRS itself.

cargo xtask desktop-test checks that Flathub is configured, that its signed summary downloads and verifies, and that bubblewrap makes a sandbox for an unprivileged user. It does not install an application. See Testing.

The launch helper

flatpak-system-helper is started on demand by dbus-daemon’s setuid launch helper, which hideOS installs 4755 rather than upstream’s 4750 root:messagebus. Why is in Development notes.

The portals

How a sandboxed application opens a file, takes a screenshot, shares the screen or sends a notification: by asking the desktop, over D-Bus, instead of reaching around its sandbox.

  • xdg-desktop-portal 1.22: the desktop-neutral half and the document portal, D-Bus activated on the session bus. Icons and sounds that applications hand it are checked in bubblewrap before they are shown or played. Built without geoclue and gudev, so there is no location or USB portal.
  • xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic (COSMIC epoch 1.9): COSMIC’s dialogs — the file chooser, screenshots, screen casting through PipeWire, and the settings applications read their theme from. xdg-desktop-portal picks it from cosmic-portals.conf when XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP is COSMIC. Built without its systemd feature, whose only use is logging to journald; it logs to stderr.

hide shell (planned)

Not written. The plan is a toolbox-style Podman container sharing the user’s home and display, with any distribution inside it, for compilers, language toolchains and package managers. Podman is not packaged yet. Until then, the hideOS image has no compiler, by design: images ship without one.