There are big wishes for Signal to adopt the perfectly working Flatpak.
This will make Signal show up in the verified subsection of Flathub, it will improve trust, allow a central place for bug reports and support and ease maintenance.
Flatpak works on pretty much all Distros, including the ones covered by their current “Linux = Ubuntu” .deb repo.
To make a good decision, we need to have some statistics about who uses which package.
Personally I install it with pacman and generally avoid Flatpaks due to annoying problems I’ve had with it limiting filesystem access in the past. My biggest problem is that it seems to “forget” that I’m logged in if I don’t use it regularly, meaning I have to regularly re-auth it on my desktop since I use it infrequently there.
Flatpaks are generally made way to loosely. Always “not breaking” > “being secure”.
So this should not really be the case, drag&drop doesnt work yet, maybe copy-pasting files doesnt if the app cannot access that directory statically (you need to add an attachment from within the app, your file picker will open which is a “portal” which links that file into the apps container and thus allows the app to see it.)
Everything else works normally, screensharing too
That’s an understandable goal, but as a user, breaking the user experience when I go to send a file to someone only to find that I can’t even see it in some apps is a deal breaker. If the app can’t be trusted to do that, I won’t use it.
What do you mran by this?
This makes no sense.
You cannot trust any app to do anything. Look at their code, or ask people that know people that heard of people that looked at their code (how it is currently done in FOSS, lol).
Modern apps integrate portals & pipewire permissions. Bad apps dont, and they suck. Please annoy Slack with that, they have to adopt the Flatpak and modernize the code. Its like a few dozen lines to replace a custom own filepicker with the xdg-desktop-portal file picker of the OS.
I wasn’t talking about Slack. Actually, my worst Flatpak experience was with PyCharm. The fs limitations mean it couldn’t see files like
${HOME}/.config/git/ignoreor load up my shell environment inside the IDE. It’s basically a neutered version of the app because someone decided to draw the security/usability line too far in the one direction.It’s fine if you think that’s a good idea, but as a user, the choice of packaging means it’s not useful to me, so I won’t use it.
Last time I installed slack through flatpack I couldn’t send any files. Not through drag-and-drop, neither through the filepicker. The latter was just empty.
Downloading files from slack also had awfully weird side-effects.
Slack doesn’t have an apt repo, so I download debs and updat manually. Maybe once half-a-year.
If that’s the experience I’d get on my signal through flatpack, I’d also rather be downloading manually. And I’d even compile from source rather than deal with that flatpack stuff.
This is just so bad. I can’t use anything snap/flatpack cuz it simply won’t let me send a file. As it runs on it’s on file subsystem and doesn’t have access to anything else.
On the other hand, an app that has access to my entire hard-drive is awfully insecure, right? So, what’s the solution?
in the meantime they could include an option “I allow this app to acess my whole $HOME, thanks, I need it cuz I am a user not a security researcher”. Until then I’m not touching flatpack