NoFear is a tool developed by Quarkslab to sandbox applications transparently thanks to hardware virtualization. More information can be found in the No Tears, No Fears blogpost.

Features:

• Launch any application, cli or GUI, instantaneously in a VM.
• The host filesystem is mounted with an overlayfs (write modifications are kept in the VM). Some folders of the host filesystem (notably /etc and /home) aren’t accessible from the VM. Inside the VM, /etc and /home folders are initialized with a few standard configuration files.
• There’s nothing to configure.
• VMs boot on a usual Linux kernel built with the minimum required (no hardware driver for example) in a few hundred of milliseconds.

Example for uname -a:

$ nofear uname -a
Linux nofear-default 4.4.27 #1 SMP Mon Jan 2 10:52:39 CET 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Launching a GUI application takes a bit more time (a few seconds):

$ nofear --gui --sound firefox