“I think 2026 has never been a better time to think about what confinement might look like on your workstation. I think it is only a matter of time before we see very influential people having their credentials leaked because an agent did something silly.”

LINUX Unplugged · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

Context

Seager was defending Canonical's plan to move the Ubuntu desktop to an immutable, snap-based Core design. His argument is that AI agents running with full user permissions are a growing security risk that confinement addresses.

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Transcript

LINUX Unplugged Around 15:54 into the episode

Speaker 3

A little.

Speaker 1

All right. But here's the

Speaker 3

…place. Wes Payne live patch the kernel. So that's not a drawback. It also brings that lovely, I want to switch the desktop environment for a day and see what happens type effect without crapping all over your system. You can just install the KDE snap, boot that for a while, remove the KDE snap and go back to GNOME. I hope that there will be Cosmic Snaps and NIRI snaps and all the rest of it. And I think 2026 has never been a better time to think about what confinement might look like on your workstation. I think it is only a matter of time before we see very influential people having their credentials leaked because an agent did something silly. Sure. And the way I run my machine is I have very little installed on it. I have a browser, I have a chat client, I have a terminal, and then pretty much everything I do is in a LexD container or a VM or something like that. And I think that's the model we push people towards. And there is a story here on the compatibility front that really has come into focus in the last year that I couldn't…

Speaker 1

Okay. So, okay, I got to, this is a lot. So, first of all, what I caught in there is it doesn't sound like alternative desktops are out. So they're going to be able to run Plasma and Cosmic. That's all going to be still a thing.

Speaker 3

We're actually working with the KDE folks on right from the start. So we are paying a company. Who's quite heavily involved in the KDE Neon community to work alongside us, like in our teams day to day, to basically develop the KDE, like cutting-edge KDE track alongside what we're doing with the…

Speaker 1

that. What kept me from having a proper website for a long time was it just felt expensive and time consuming. I mean, for some folks, it means you have to hire someone. For others, like me, it means at least a weekend of research to look at a stack of tools. Hostinger's AI Builder flips that.…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from LINUX Unplugged

“in the last six months, our kernel team have shipped more security patches than in the prior 20 years of Ubuntu. And so that's not an excuse for the vulnerability that we missed and perhaps were less timely than people would have liked.” — Jon Seager, LINUX Unplugged

“Ptrace is being restricted by default. This doesn't break strace, but if you're trying to trace an already running process, then you're going to need to change a system setting. What they're doing, which is kind of clever, is they ship scope zero, where a process can only do it to its own threads. But if you install a debugging tool that might need this functionality legitimately, it ships a linked package which sets that system setting back to one. So hopefully you won't notice it.” — Wes Payne, LINUX Unplugged