Sandbox Applications

To provide children with a safe place to play, you create a walled area and store their toys inside a small box (or container). When this idea moves to the playground, we refer to it as a sandbox. The term sandbox in application development comes from this same idea.

In the sandboxing approach, each application resides in a sandbox, a controlled and restricted environment for running its code. This environment helps developers isolate and protect system resources.

Developers also use sandboxed environments to identify an application’s behavior and to detect bugs or other undesirable elements of its behavior.

There are several methods of sandboxing applications for Linux environments. In this book, we focus on some of them, including those considered the least intrusive (Applmage) and those developed and supported by the Fedora Project (Flatpak).

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Inspecting sandbox...