I’ve been using arch for a while now and I always used Flatpaks for proprietary software that might do some creepy shit because Flatpaks are supposed to be sandboxed (e.g. Steam). And Flatpaks always worked flawlessly OOTB for me. AUR for things I trust. I’ve read on the internet how people prefer AUR over Flatpaks. Why? And how do y’all cope with waiting for all the AUR installed packages to rebuild after every update? Alacritty takes ages to build for me. Which is why I only update the AUR installed and built applications every 2 weeks.
Flatpaks don’t securely download. Use your native package manager
In what way don’t they “securely download” ?
No cryptographic signature verification, like most package managers have
That doesn’t seem to be true? https://flatpak-testing.readthedocs.io/en/latest/distributing-applications.html#gpg-signatures
The link you sent says that its an option that can be turned on or off. Also, that’s for uploading. Doesn’t say anytbify about verification of downloads.
From the page:
That is talking about downloading as well. Yes, you can turn it off, but so can you usually do it with native package managers, e.g. pacman: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Package_signing
where does it say this applies to downloads too?
I’m confused why you think it would be anything else, and why you are so dead set on this. Repos include a signing key. There is an option to skip signature checking. And you think that signature checking is not used during downloads, despite this?
Ok, here are a few issues related to signatures being checked by default, when downloading: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4836 https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/5657 https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3769 https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/5246 https://askubuntu.com/questions/1433512/flatpak-cant-check-signature-public-key-not-found https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70839691/flatpak-not-working-apparently-gpg-issue
Flatpak repos are signed and the signature is checked when downloading.
It’s OK to be wrong. Dying on this hill seems pretty weird to me.
If its not documented, we shouldn’t assume it has a security feature.