Nice
Good to see one of the two big packaging hubs do something against malware
How does that Help against Malware?
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Because if you search Firefox and see a badge that says verified, you can be confident that it was Mozilla that packaged it and added it to FlatHub as opposed to some random scammer.
You can’t just upload a App to Flathub. Everythng is reviewed.
Things get missed. And they don’t get reviewed in every update, just the original upload.
Apt has done this forever
Verification doesnt help at all if the source is not trusted. All this says is “upstream developers maintain this package”. Unofficial packages can be safe too, like VLC.
It does help prevent actual malware from being downloaded, though, since upstream developers probably won’t publish malware on Flathub.
But this is still a half-measure. I don’t understand why Red Hat and Canonical don’t treat this issue seriously; people on Linux are used to assuming software installed from the repos are safe, and yet Snap and Flatpak are being pushed more and more despite their main repositories being potentially unsafe.
Flathub is doing more and more, but stuff like hiding
--subset=verifiedis very bad.They simply need to gain critical mass until they can force changes like portals etc.
If you create malware and publish it on flathub, you are the upstream dev. But for sure it helps against duplicate scams.
I can’t find it now, but I read that the verification process also includes human review (for the initial verification, not every update), so it should actually prevent “verified” malware (though it does nothing against unverified malware).
Edit: Here’s an article with this and more info: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/966187/3ef48792e5e8c71d/
Nice!
Add flathub with
--subset=verifiedand get apps you really need from their .flatpakref files
Because both Red Hat and Canonical are of the “pay us to care” mindset. If you aren’t paying for support, you’re a freeloader and need to do your own research.
I mean, that’s pretty much all open source software and isn’t specific at all to RH/Canonical.
What’s provided to you is provided without warranty and you’re not automatically entitled to support, etc.
That’s not entirely true with Red Hat. There’s a lot of work that they’ve done in the open source community that they haven’t shared back. And canonical seems to think this is a good idea.
I’m not really sure what you mean by that. What do you mean they’ve done a lot of work for the open source community that they haven’t shared back?
And what does it have to do with providing software support free of charge?
Fedora has their own flatpak repo built from their own rpms and their own runtime. Flathub has more flatpaks though.
This is a good step but I still feel like it’s pretty obscure where a package is actually coming from. “by Google” or for the Steam package “by Valve” is really confusing and makes it sounds like it’s coming directly from the company. Unverified tells the user to pay attention but there is no hover over to say what it actually means.
Wait… so the author displayed in “by <author>” is the supposed author of the software, not the one that put it on the store? That’s insane! Also sounds like you’d be open to massive liability since the reputation of the software author will be damaged if somebody publishes malware under their name.
It should be:
- Developed by: <author of software>
- Uploaded by: <entity who uploaded to store>
Also maaany packages direct to issuetrackers of projects not supporting that flatpak.
If someone knows where that flathub metadata is stored I would love to know, as the manifest is not it. I would like to fix those to link to their own bugtrackers
Traditional GNU/Linux distributions (as well as F-Droid) are not “app stores” even though they are superficially similar. Traditional distributions are maintained and curated by the community, and serve the interests of users first and software developers second, whereas an “app store” has minimal curation and serves the needs of software developers first and users second.
I point this out because there’s an annoying meme that traditional distributions are obsoleted by the “app store” model. I don’t think that’s the case. “Verification” is essential for an app store but pointless for a distribution.
So all of them?
Would be nice if FlatHub actually supported cryptographic verification of apps…
Flathubs repository’s is GPG signed.
Nope. Link me to the docs that say this.
The GPG key is literally in the repo file https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Lol that’s not for signing the packages
There is no such thing as a “package”. It is a repository of binary data with references to data in it (ala git). The whole repo and all data is gpg signed.
Your claim that package payloads are signed is bullshit. Back it up by citing your sources
> ostree show flathub:runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/6.6 commit a7443e846cf67d007fcecda5c9dc27844001cfb8929064395cfc25c6d71d9474 Parent: 23107550082daf3b2892a4a0db2543838578ca882340a756b988bc5c1614540c ContentChecksum: 607ba9475d32a24c51509bc7919f5a93d401f8f7198c30ad93ad74051d966c41 Date: 2024-01-30 13:55:08 +0000 build of org.kde.Sdk, Tue Jan 30 11:23:00 UTC 2024 (5998d2f3ef21414d14f066ab91fa44e5aef65b90) Name: org.kde.Platform Arch: x86_64 Branch: 6.6 Built with: Flatpak 1.14.4 Found 1 signature: Signature made Tue 30 Jan 2024 12:21:18 PM CST using RSA key ID 562702E9E3ED7EE8 Good signature from "Flathub Repo Signing Key <[email protected]>" Primary key ID 4184DD4D907A7CAE Key expires Mon 14 Jun 2027 08:19:40 AM CDT Primary key expires Mon 14 Jun 2027 08:18:56 AM CDT
great, when appimage hub begin doing this
What app is that GUI from?
This screenshot is from the Flathub website. The only good GUI for Flatpaks…
The only good GUI for Flatpaks…
Ain’t that the truth. I don’t know why KDE Discover is so sluggish when it comes to Flatpak, it takes me like 10+ seconds to load the landing page and see the popular apps.
And several minutes to update a 10MB app…
what? there’s something wrong with your internet
Nah, it’s Discover that’s shit. Flatpak’s CLI works fine.
Likewise with Gnome in my experience. I’ve been using the CLI but am now realizing I might be missing out on some important information by doing that
It’s definitely faster than it used to be. But yeah, searching for app updates is still more sluggish than through the terminal, at least on Fedora Workstation.
Gnome Software is pretty similar. KDE Discover way worse.
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