The Software Manager app in Linux Mint 22 will deliver faster start-up times and introduce a significant security safeguard for search results. As you may
The question is, do they change the remote or just hide the apps?
I currently use 2 flathub remotes, the verified (named flathub-v) and the unfiltered one. When installing from CLI I can see if it is verified (2 possible remotes show up). I hope COSMIC store and KDE Discover will show the verification check soon.
But a few popular ones are not, like VLC (developers dont know Flatpak, should get an introduction by the current maintainer), Inkscape, Spotify, Steam, Bitwarden, Signal, Torbrowser launcher, Blender, Calibre, and more (excluding Chromium Browsers, use the native versions for security reasons) are all missing.
Important things to consider:
distro packages are nearly always unverified i.e. maintained by distro packagers instead of upstream
spotify flatpak is not verified, but the flatpak is securely packaged. Mint has a deb repo, and that proprietary piece of malware could do whatever they like with your entire system
flatpaks are very often more secure, at least they have some security mechanism that can be easily manually hardened. Unlike firejail or bubblejail, which are very complex.
The difference with the distro package is that you are already using the distro anyway. If you cannot trust the distro package then the whole distro itself is untrusted. Or depending on the repo provided, maybe the whole repo not the whole distro.
Have a look at my flatpak repo list with instructions on that
The question is, do they change the remote or just hide the apps?
I currently use 2 flathub remotes, the verified (named
flathub-v
) and the unfiltered one. When installing from CLI I can see if it is verified (2 possible remotes show up). I hope COSMIC store and KDE Discover will show the verification check soon.I use nearly only verified Flatpaks (a list of recommended ones is here, will soon update)
But a few popular ones are not, like VLC (developers dont know Flatpak, should get an introduction by the current maintainer), Inkscape, Spotify, Steam, Bitwarden, Signal, Torbrowser launcher, Blender, Calibre, and more (excluding Chromium Browsers, use the native versions for security reasons) are all missing.
Important things to consider:
The difference with the distro package is that you are already using the distro anyway. If you cannot trust the distro package then the whole distro itself is untrusted. Or depending on the repo provided, maybe the whole repo not the whole distro.
There is a difference between the packages shipped by default, and any random package in the repo.
In this case, Ubuntus universe repo will have less supported packages.