Atemu

None of this puts the user out of control; they’re free to add the Flathub repository should they wish to do so.

He

I hate to be that guy but OP gave no indication of their gender. English has the luxury of having a “natural” neutral pronoun; please just use that.

which these suggested Fedora Spins are designed to integrate with as tightly as possible

Could you explain what exactly this “tight integration” pertains? AFAIK these are just regular old global-state distros but with read-only snapshotting for said global state (RPM-ostree, “immutable”).
Read-only global system configuration state in pretty much requires usage of Flatpak and the like for user-level package application management because you aren’t supposed to modify the global system state to do so but that’s about the extent that I know such distros interact with Flatpak etc.

Bazzite is completely the opposite of an OS designed to run one app at once, which means you haven’t tried it before rubbishing it as a suggestion.

That is their one and only stated goal: Run games.

I don’t know about you but I typically only run one game at a time and have a hard time imagining how any gaming-focused distro would do it any other way besides running basic utilities in the background (i.e. comms software.).

Obviously you can use it to do non-gaming stuff too but at that point it’s just a regular old distro with read-only system state. You can install Flatpak, distrobox etc. on distros that have mutable system state too for that matter.

Could you point out the specific concrete things Bazzite does to improve separation between applications beyond the sandboxing tools that are available to any distribution?

It’s true that I haven’t used Bazzite; I have no use for imperative global state distributions and am capable of applying modifications useful for gaming on my own. It’s not like I haven’t done my research though.

“No your honour, we do not offer users any patented software, we merely ship a system which directs users to this other totally unrelated entity that we are fully aware ships patented software.” will not hold up in court.

I also imagine RH would simply like control over the repository content they offer to users by default. Flathub acts more like a 3rd party user repository than a “proper” distro.

I don’t assume you to be stupid, so lack of information is the most likely explanation for not knowing what “it” refers to here.

Read the linked issue first perhaps.

Offering patented software would open Fedora (a RedHat product mind you) up to legal issues in places that know software patents (primarily the U.S.).

There is no distribution that does what you’re looking for. All the ones recommended by others in this thread are just generic distributions that do nothing special to separate user applications and I have no idea why they saw fit to mention them at all.

The best recommendation here is Qubes but that’s arguably not a distro but rather its own operating system that can then run some instances of distros inside of it with strong separation between those units.

The only thing that somewhat goes the direction you want is Flatpak but it’s not anywhere close to Androids really quite solid app separation scheme.

The reality of it is that most Linux desktop apps are made with the assumption that they are permitted to access every resource the user has access to with no differentiation; your SSH or GPG private keys are in the same category as the app’s config file.

Standard APIs to manage permissions in a more fine-grained manner are slowly being worked on (primarily by the flatpak community IME) but it’s slow and mostly focused on container stuff which I’m not convinced is the way forward. There does not appear to be any strong effort towards creating a resource access control design that’s anywhere near as good as Android’s in any case though.

The closest thing we have is systemd hardening for system components but that’s obviously not relevant for desktop apps. It’s also (IMHO) inherently flawed due to using a blocklist approach rather than an allow-list one. It’s also quite rigid in what resources it controls.

I’m not convinced any of the existing technologies we have right now is fit for a modern user-facing system.

Here’s what I think we ought to have:

• A method to identify applications at runtime (e.g. to tell apart your browser from your terminal and your editor at runtime)
• A generic extensible way to declare resources to which access should be controlled within a single user context (i.e. some partition of your home filesystem or some device that your user generally has access to such as your camera)
• A user-configurable mapping between resources and applications; enforced by kernel-level generic mechanisms

No need for any containers here for any of this; they’re a crutch for poor legacy distro design that relies on global state. I don’t see a need for breaking the entire UNIX process model by unsharing all resources and then passing in some of them through by overly complex methods either.

Eventhough they’re quite simple and effective, I’m not convinced UNIX users are a good primitive to use for application identification like Android does it because that implies user data file ownership needs to be managed by some separate component rather than the standard IO operations that any Linux apps ever uses for everything.
I think this should instead be achieved using cgroups instead which are the single most important invention in operating systems that you can actually use today since UNIX IMHO.

The missing parts are therefore a standard for resource declaration and a standard and mechanism to assign them to applications (identified via cgroup).
I haven’t done much research into whether these exist or how they could me made to exist.

That is not relevant here in any way. That’s a distro made to easily run one app at a time without really caring about data security w.r.t. that app.

Is this your personal phone? If your work were to dictate what you are allowed to install on your personal phone, that’d be a serious overstepping of bounds.

Perhaps you can sneak in f-droid via adb install and give it app installation permissions via ADB though.