this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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I think it is a stupid change myself, but as far as I (recent Linux convert) can tell, mint is considered the go to distro for people coming freshly over from windows, and decidedly caters to beginners. A default setting for maximum user protection makes sense for that.
Being unable to install 90% of the popular apps without diving into settings does not make sense for a beginner-focused distro whatsoever
Well I agreed that it is an ultimately bad change, but I can see how the beginner mode mentality would lead to this conclusion. Provide the new user with the most stable and bug free experience possible, and after some time they will probably turn that setting off on their own to get all that popular software.
Yes but also these people are coming over from windows and this is their first experience with linux. They should have these apps available to them so they dont think oh linux has no apps.
Especially as many Flatpaks are already working better than Ubuntu apps. I had this with SciDAVis, where the Ubuntu version was just broken and gave me tons of troubles.
Flatpak is a blessing
Or oh linux has only sketchy unverified ones and I need to master the terminal to install official apps
Who thinks that? Mint users?
I've seen many articles, comments and videos praising mint for being friendly to users coming from windows. It looks nice and I've been impressed by the friendliness and helpfulness of their forums - if I switched on my laptop I would try mint first.
I like Mint so far after about 2 months. Ubuntu was seriously lacking.
I dont know, it is just the general consensus on every "I want to drop windows but i am scared of Linux" post ever made, and from my personal experience I found it actually too much like windows (made a live boot before I chose another distro).
Meanwhile, they have a Spotify Ubuntu repo... and will offer the installation of all these apps as .deb's which are able to do whatever they want
The difference is that those apps are taken charge of by the mint team
These are Ubuntu Packages. The external Spotify repo are binaries shipped by Spotify. I dont think there is any testing before users get that package, it is an external repo.
Oh, alright i was wrong, but it's still direct from Spotify isn't it? So no problem
It is proprierary Software, running as a pretty unrestricted app on your system.
The app could steal your Keys, read your photos, scan for pirated music or whatever.
Yeah, no problem XD
for sure you could do the Microsoft Way and trust random big tech, because otherwise you would just sue them... but no.
The spotify Flatpak has no Filesystem permissions afaik, and it thus pretty okay secure, even if you dont trust the upstream.
Ok yes it is proprietary, but at least it's from the main source and is confirmed to work well, which reduces risk, at the cost of sandboxing.
it's a tradeoff, and I think mint did the right thing.
The Flatpak meanwhile is transparently packaged, using the binary from the official Snap.
Canonical to my knowledge took forever for convincing Spotify to support Linux. Supporting Flatpak should be easy, but whatever.
This isn't about just Spotify, it's about other apps too
Yes but this was just an example of the hypocrisy of this action.
--subset=flossfor that--subset=verifiedfor this very nice ability (but this does not mean that unverified apps are worse than distro packages!)Flatpak is really good. You can look at the permissions, any app with the "safe" rating is probably safe, even if it is malware.
Btw the safety rating would be a good filter, once they solve the false negatives of stuff like ProtonPro/pupGui.