Leaflet

The really big one for me is installing things. Installing packages requires 0 interaction, can be easily automated, wide availability of packages, etc. On Windows, Winget sucks. It’s just running the regular installers. MacOS is better since it has Homebrew, but it has some problems. Homebrew struggles to update “casks” (aka GUI apps) so you still have to rely on app’s in-app updaters. MacOS’s gatekeeper also is annoying about third part software. And for anything not in Homebrew, you have to install it from the web.

Programming is also easiest in Linux. MacOS is a pain sometimes. The preinstalled toolchains are outdated. Installing new ones from homebrew also requires reading through a large block of text in order to find out what manual steps you need to do.

By default, flatpaks have no permissions. All permissions must be manually specified in the manifest file. But if you look at the top apps on Flathub, they tend to have broad filesystem permissions, including home and host. This are pretty bad permissions because it’s insanely easy to escape the sandbox with them since there are no protections against writing to files like .bashrc. Snap at least prevents apps from accessing hidden files for this reason.

Flatpak isn’t as strong as a sandbox as Android. But if you tweak permissions, it can be deemed good enough.

If you really wanted security, you’d want to learn SELinux, but that’s a whole rabbit hole of complexity.