Flatpak program (FreeCAD) running itself as superuser?

6 months ago by empireOfLove2 to c/linux

I run Debian 13 with MATE. I recently switched from the distro release to the flatpak version of FreeCAD, as the distro release is of course a few versions behind. Bear with me, as I am very new to using Flatpak or anything other than normal apt packages.

I just noticed that FreeCAD announces it is running as super user in the window title bar.

The interesting part is it doesn't ask for privilege escalation with password entry when I launch it.

Seeing as FreeCAD never ran as SU with the distro release installed via apt, and I don't think the program does anything that really needs SU... As much as I trust FreeCAD, this seems like a security hole I'd rather not have.

Is the Flatpak version running inside it's own "box" and it isn't getting SU permissions across my whole system? Or what am I missing here.

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IanTwenty 20 points 6 months ago

Looks like this long-standing issue affecting all flatpaks run under MATE/marco:

https://github.com/mate-desktop/marco/issues/301

Applications launched under Firejail and Flatpak include "(as superuser)" in their window's title even though they're not actually being ran as root.

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boredsquirrel 2 points 6 months ago

Likely because of user namespace access

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empireOfLove2 2 points 6 months ago

Ah okay. And makes sense seeing as it does not ask for escalation at launch. I probably won't worry about it then. Thanks!!

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