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I actually disagree with a couple of changes Mint made regarding Flatpaks. Not showing reviews for unverified Flatpaks especially.
I get it, they want to punish unverified Flatpaks to give them a kick up the arse to get verified. But it also means that if something nefarious is going on with the unverified Flatpak, and Mint hasn’t taken it down yet, users can’t see reviews that might alert them to the app being dodgy.
I know of a number of times I’ve went to download an app on android that I’ve heard of only to see recent 1 star reviews saying stuff like “this has been bought by an ad company and filled with data harvesting and ads”, or “this has been bought by a Chinese government-linked company, beware”. I want to see shit like that, verified app or not.
It’s a similar issue to YouTube hiding dislikes making it difficult to quickly see whether a video guide is helpful/legit or not.
There’s also them disabling unverified Flatpaks by default. I can see why, but at the same time it’s perhaps hypocritical considering any software they package also isn’t packaged by the original software creator.
That said, I’m not that fussed about this one considering that if you’re using Mint in the first place, you probably trust Mint/Canonical and their repositories.
Yeah I definitely don’t want to sound negative on Flatpaks or on Mint, though.
Flatpaks are my preferred way of packaging apps, and while I’ve moved on from Mint for my own usecase (I like Gnome so Fedora made more sense to me), I always install Mint on other people’s old machines because it just works, is similar to Windows UX, doesn’t require you to be on top of updates very much, and has pretty sane defaults.
