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One of the things I’ve been recently working on at Igalia is the desktop portals implementation, the middleware layer of API for application and toolkit developers that allows sandboxed applications to interact with the host system. Sandboxing technologies like Flatpak and Snap expose the portal D-Bus interfaces inside the sandbox they manage, to handle user-mediated interactions like opening a file that exists outside of the locations available to the sandboxed process, or talking to privileged components
Outside of allowing dynamic permissions for sandboxed applications, portals act as a vendor-neutral API for applications to target when dealing with Linux as an OS ; this is mostly helpful for commercial applications that are not tied to a specific desktop environment, but don’t want to re-implement the layer of system integration from the first principles of POSIX primitives.
The architecture of desktop portals has been described pretty well in a blog post by Peter Hutterer , but to recap:
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