this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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The problem here is that most packages aren't maintained by developers, but rather by independent package maintainers from respective distributions.
In my eyes, this adds another potential point of failure outside the control of the developer of a given tool.
On the contrary. The Fedora maintainers saved all their Audacity users when audacity introduced a spyware in their build. The flatpak had the spyware for months while the Fedora release of audacity was made secure by the maintainers. I value this, if you remove the people doing it then you remove value for everyone. It all comes down to how much you value your privacy.
Windows has a fantastic model where every software just work. It's great! The result is an abomination of devs stealing your data or doing whatever mess on your computer. "Free software" was synonymous of red alerts and we used programs like Adaware or whatever cleaner software. Each months there was another new cleaner utility. When was the last time you cleaned your distro?
Try to expand the scale of flatpak and you'll see that you will hit the same problems that any other distro.
I don't really see Fedora maintainting a patched version of audacity as a fault of Flatpak, though.
Flathub is designed to allow developers to publish their own software in the way they intended. So Flathub and Flatpak are doing exactly what they're designed to do
Well, I can't give you a better example of the effect of auditing softwares for your desktop. One source, Fedora, had the app patched, while the other, official on flathub, published the flawed version on purpose.
You'd prefer to run the flatpak version of audacity with the spyware on? I don't buy that.
Okay, so it's another way to phrase that you really preferred the version of flatpak with the spyware, since it's the version intended by Audacity. With flatpak and flathub you are alone.
Fedora and their maintainers offer you a layer of no-nonsense, you should think twice before writing it off. I don't think that you fully realize the quality of what you have right now in your hands in term of desktop. Popularity has a price and Windows users paid the price for it.