XDG-App Continues Maturing For GNOME App Sandboxing

The past few months have been very busy for Alexander Larsson and other GNOME developers leading the charge on XDG-App, their approach for sandboxing desktop applications.

XDG-App has made much progress and is found in a "tech preview" state for GNOME 3.18 but it's not until GNOME 3.20 and later where things will get more interesting. Alexander Larsson has provided a "Christmas 2015" update concerning the project for GNOME sandboxing.

With this week's release of xdg-app 0.4.6, there is now a libxdg-app library that's still in early stages of development for providing UI-driven management of XDG-App applications. There will eventually be integration within GNOME Software for handling these packaged apps.

XDG-App also has a new xdg-app-builder tool for more easily bundling applications within the contained environment.

As a reminder, this sandboxed applications approach relies upon Wayland, KDBUS, SELinux, and other modern Linux technologies for operation. With KDBUS back to the design stage, it could be a while still before seeing XDG-Apps become more popular on the GNOME desktop.

More details regarding the current state of this project can be found via this blog post.