linuxmemes

You don't need to say the words "sandboxed" or "isolated" to say effectively the same thing. Your goal with distrobox was to keep the AUR malware separate from your normal system, no?

Security through obscurity is not security. The malware can do the same data exfiltration regardless of root access because the AUR malware has been about stealing secrets in user-readable directories. Setting a custom home for distrobox does not disallow access to the normal one.

Say for example that your default user home is /home/user and you set the distrobox home to /tmp/home

If you run ls $HOME inside distrobox it will list files in /tmp/home, but just as easily you could run ls /home/$USER and it would list in your default home. Or alternatively just use the find command and steal secrets without targeting the user home.

This is because changing the user home through distrobox doesn't do anything about preventing directory traversal to your default home.

If your goal is to create a different environment and you don't care that it won't stop malware, use Incus or Podman directly. Distrobox is the wrong choice.

My point was simple: when dealing with malware, distrobox is not an effective method of creating a "different environment" because that is antithetical to its stated goals.

You can do whatever you want, I am not here to police your choice on your personal system. I only take issue with recommending this strategy to others.