this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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    Dont install random stuff to your system guys (lemmy.kde.social)
    submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
    63 comments fedilink hide all child comments
     
    flatpak remote-add flathub-verified --subset=verified https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
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    [–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I have just had bad experiences with flatpack so I don't want to use it and the aur has the stuff I need and flatpack dose not

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

    You need to be more specific.

    You need to think about the background problem here.

    When Google made Android, it was web based. Their "perfect sandbox" ironically has no internet toggle. They won tons of marketshare, and iOS is not different here, both restrict apps to containers and have permission systems to reach out of these containers to access sensors, files and other data.

    Desktop operating systems are way older and have no such concept. We have mandatory access control with SELinux and Apparmor, but those are (I think) more complicated than Flatpak.

    Flatpak is a solution for multiple problems of Desktop Linux Apps at once.

    1. isolate apps with a real permission system
    2. make apps run anywhere
    3. have a single platform to target, so we dont need packagers anymore (for most GUI apps) and can file bugs upstream
    4. separating apps from the system: stable distros can have modern apps (similar to Windows) and Apps dont affect the stability of the OS at all. Also config files of such apps are in their container, not bloating your "oh so good xdg basedir"

    These are all extremely important points for a healthy, modern and secure Linux Desktop.

    But there are also issues to every point:

    1. most apps are not adapted to this model, which means they need broad static permissions like Pulseaudio, home or even host, allowing surveillance or trivial (even documented) privilege escalation. This is basically how apps like Flatseal work. Pulseaudio has no portal, do apps can listen to your mic whenever they want.
    2. Apps that "run everywhere" will not have distro-specific optimizations. The system needs to run on old LTS kernels to be universal, which means you miss out on tons of optimizations. Developers could just not care, but this depends on the app.
    3. Flatpak is more complicated than Snap (or even Appimage, if you leave the manual signing, monitoring vulnerable libraries and having a manual repo out). So it is not a great experience for "the Linux packaging model". GNOME Builder is a good IDE for it but afaik only for GTK apps.
    4. No issues here. This is the core princible of "immutable" distros like Fedora Atomic Desktops.

    If you have issues with flatpaks, you need to be more specific. Maybe it is a packaging issue, or you expect an app to do stuff that is not

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    I've had nothing but good experiences with Flatpaks/Flathub and bad experiences with AUR/nixpkgs.

    Fedora also has it's own Flatpak repo now with it's own runtime.

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

    Same. Ubuntu AND Fedora Libreoffice, SciDAVis and more where broken, not the Flatpaks.

    Flatpak is really meant for the big GUI apps. No problem with small distro packages really. It just takes off the huge burdens of maintaining distro packages for like Libreoffice, which is as big as the Linux Kernel.

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

    I just hate snaps lol

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    I don't care about flatpaks, overlays have everything

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    What is "overlays"? You can overlay packages with various package managers from many repos on many distros

    [–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    Flathub doesn't have the apps i need from AUR.

    [–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Fair point. But when apps are on Flathub and people say "I dont care I have the AUR" they need to know.

    • the AUR has no verification at all
    • the apps have no permission system at all, so you need to trust them 100%
    • they are installed on your system and might mess up updates, give dependency errors etc.
    • their solution does not apply to nontechnical people. If a solution is not scaleable, it is not a good solution
    [–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    All you need to verify an AUR package is to read the PKGBUILD file, which is something the AUR keeps on encouraging you to do (this assumes that you trust the upstream repo, which is something that even official packagers of most distros do)

    Also a lot of flatpak packages aren't sand boxed enough to be safe and only ends up giving false sense of security to nontechnical users

    Your last point is extremely important though, AUR is horrible for nontechnical users (which is why the AUR discourages AUR helpers)

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

    Okay having an easily readable build file is a bit missing. Flathub hides that a lot.

    I think their rating system, which is on the website and also GNOME Software, displays apps with home access as insecure.

    And somehow this seems to be general knowledge and an issue about a privilege escalation through a local override was just closed. Yay

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    Some of your points apply to Flathub too and i'm a technical people.

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

    What points?

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