this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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Linux Mint Will Hide Unverified Flatpaks in Software Manager (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
submitted 5 months ago by petsoi@discuss.tchncs.de to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It is proprierary Software, running as a pretty unrestricted app on your system.

The app could steal your Keys, read your photos, scan for pirated music or whatever.

Yeah, no problem XD

for sure you could do the Microsoft Way and trust random big tech, because otherwise you would just sue them... but no.

The spotify Flatpak has no Filesystem permissions afaik, and it thus pretty okay secure, even if you dont trust the upstream.

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ok yes it is proprietary, but at least it's from the main source and is confirmed to work well, which reduces risk, at the cost of sandboxing.

it's a tradeoff, and I think mint did the right thing.

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The Flatpak meanwhile is transparently packaged, using the binary from the official Snap.

Canonical to my knowledge took forever for convincing Spotify to support Linux. Supporting Flatpak should be easy, but whatever.

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This isn't about just Spotify, it's about other apps too

[–] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 months ago

Yes but this was just an example of the hypocrisy of this action.

  1. Apps that are FOSS are possible to trust. Proprietary apps are simply liability, and proprietary software is constantly spying anyways. Flathub has --subset=floss for that
  2. "Verification" i.e. upstream support is not the case with a majority of Distro packages. Flathub has --subset=verified for this very nice ability (but this does not mean that unverified apps are worse than distro packages!)
  3. Flatpaks are isolated using Bubblewrap. Firejail, a common alternative for native app sandboxing, had a root binary and thus you need to trust it a lot. Bubblejail is a predecessor of it, but it is not easy to use at all and in early stages. So Flatpak offers stupid simple app isolation similar to Android, Distro packages dont have this.

Flatpak is really good. You can look at the permissions, any app with the "safe" rating is probably safe, even if it is malware.

Btw the safety rating would be a good filter, once they solve the false negatives of stuff like ProtonPro/pupGui.