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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • To be honest, even this seems like a step in the right direction, as they’re direct and transparent about exactly what they use. Sure, it should be normal, and those toggle popups with a “Reject All” that does not cover everything (usually strategically leaving “legitimate interest” be) should rot in bankrupcy after a fine. Without large and sure fines, it’s the cost of doing (profitable) business.

    Hopefully, eYou will see the good aspects of not using invasive tracking tech, especially america-based black boxes.




  • Tbh, “company policy” are magical words.

    I assume if something illegal gets labeled as “Company Policy” (even though it isn’t), the company should immediately be held accountable regardless - so terrible managers don’t get to throw those two words around as a magic shield to protect themselves from employees being cognitively indisonant, unlike their perfect selves.



  • Discover itself doesn’t care about security - it’s the ubderlying package manager(s) that do.

    Flatpak is perfectly safe IMO, as are the built-in repositories.

    Both Flatpak reviewers and Debian maintaniers do their due diligence when auditing the software they distribute.

    When using distros/repos which are less FOSS purist (such as Ubuntu), you could run primarily into privacy issues. When using smaller ones, the risk of a backdoor or voulnerability is a bit larger, as less eyes are on the code.

    That being said, the only way to be immune to untargeted cyberattacks is to be offline, which isn’t reasonable in this day and age. As long as you stick to your distro’s repo and Flatpak you should be perfectly fine, save for the “normal” voulnerability or two that unfortunately slip through every now and then. You could think of this as a kind of digital “herd immunity”.

    As long as you don’t add repos willy-nilly but think about who you trust, you should be fine.

    So yeah - you can assume Flatpaks and the Debian repos are safe. They have good security policies about adding stuff in and do do their due dilligence. Though, this might change in the future, alrhough it doesn’t seem likely. But for now - you’ll be fine.

    The only real risk is if a backdoor like the recent one in xz-utils does slip through the cracks, but then you’ll be one of millions of affected machines which, while not mitigating the vulnerabilities per se will at least mean the problem will get fixed sooner once it does get found.




  • All the “App Store” apps like Discover are merely frontends for your system’s underlying package manager (apt for Debian and derivatives, dnf for Fedora and its derivatives).

    The underlying package manager does the updating of packages: if you’ve installed it through the package manager (which is usually most stuff on an install) - it’ll get updated.

    Discover just gives you a nice, user-friendly way of interfacing with the package manager(s) on your system so you don’t need to bother with the CLI if you don’t want to (that’s what “frontend” means - a nice, friendly UI for underlying services).

    And yes, you can have multiple - for example apt and Flatpak. Discover and friends should update all.