Only downside: Initially the creator of a Flatpack defines how it is sandboxed. For Steam it’s rather permissive. It’s not like on mobile where you get asked for permission for everything potentially dangerous/privacy invading, but rather like the earlier days on mobile where you install a Flatpack and implicitly allow all permissions it wants.
An update might change the permissions or introduce new ones. You can use tools like Flatseal to change the permissions of installed Flatpack apps, but keep in mind that those changes will probably be gone after the next update and can introduce problems.
In the end, sandboxing something like Steam is hard, as you not only need to think about Steam’s permissions, but also any game you might run from it…
Is that what proton does on Linux?
No, that’s just to make Windows programs/games run on Linux. But you can e.g. use the Flatpack version of Steam to Sandbox Steam and its games (https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html)
thanks, i didn’t know that! i’ll keep it in mind.
Only downside: Initially the creator of a Flatpack defines how it is sandboxed. For Steam it’s rather permissive. It’s not like on mobile where you get asked for permission for everything potentially dangerous/privacy invading, but rather like the earlier days on mobile where you install a Flatpack and implicitly allow all permissions it wants.
An update might change the permissions or introduce new ones. You can use tools like Flatseal to change the permissions of installed Flatpack apps, but keep in mind that those changes will probably be gone after the next update and can introduce problems.
In the end, sandboxing something like Steam is hard, as you not only need to think about Steam’s permissions, but also any game you might run from it…