One of the strongest points of Linux is the package management. In 2025, the world of Linux package management is very varied, with several options available, each with their advantages and trade-offs over the others.
This leads to a false sense of security. A notable issue I found is if you disallow network access to a flatpak, it can still talk to the portal and tell it to open a link in your browser. This allows it to communicate back to a server through your browser even though you disallowed it. Very terrible.
Security should to be dead easy and difficult to mess up. The countless threads I’ve read on flatpak tell me the communication about flatpak’s actual security has been quite terrible, and so it doesn’t fit this category.
Same. I like it that I can install Librewolf and some other software on Mint from Flathub instead of adding some obscure repositories with commands I don’t even understand.
True, but not in a way that SnapPakImage is going to fix.
What about that isn’t “healty”?
You are basically downloading and saving the signing key of docker to the currently recommended place with appropriate permissions, and adding the docker deb-repository, explicitly stating that it should be signed by that particular key.
If you don’t trust docker, don’t add their repo. By the same logic, the Flathub repo is an “obscure repository” too.
Flatpak is actually a really good solution. Snap is garbage though.
I do a combination of Flatpak for niche 3rd party applications and apt on Debian for standard stuff that everyone wants/needs.
My biggest gripe with flatpak is the fact it isn’t sandboxed properly by default.
I’m not referring to vendor-given privileges. Every flatpak, unless explicitly ran with the –sandbox option, has a hole in the sandbox to communicate with the portal. Even if you try to use flatseal to disallow it, it will still be silently allowed.
This leads to a false sense of security. A notable issue I found is if you disallow network access to a flatpak, it can still talk to the portal and tell it to open a link in your browser. This allows it to communicate back to a server through your browser even though you disallowed it. Very terrible.
Security should to be dead easy and difficult to mess up. The countless threads I’ve read on flatpak tell me the communication about flatpak’s actual security has been quite terrible, and so it doesn’t fit this category.
Same. I like it that I can install Librewolf and some other software on Mint from Flathub instead of adding some obscure repositories with commands I don’t even understand.
Like with docker, this isn’t healthy:
# Add Docker's official GPG key: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings sudo curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc # Add the repository to Apt sources: echo \ "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \ $(. /etc/os-release && echo "${UBUNTU_CODENAME:-$VERSION_CODENAME}") stable" | \ sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null sudo apt-get updateSource: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/
You may want to learn the commands and review the repos.
True, but not in a way that SnapPakImage is going to fix.
What about that isn’t “healty”?
You are basically downloading and saving the signing key of docker to the currently recommended place with appropriate permissions, and adding the docker deb-repository, explicitly stating that it should be signed by that particular key.
If you don’t trust docker, don’t add their repo. By the same logic, the Flathub repo is an “obscure repository” too.