this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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How is it possible, that Signal still only provides a .deb package and no .rpm, or even better AppImage or Flatpak? There is an unofficial Flatpak but is it secure?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You are right. They can’t for every distro.

But fedora/rhel, Ubuntu/debian, and arch-based distros are the most commonly used. So they can provide official packages for those, and/or as the OP said, provide an official flatpak.

And to be fair, it’s a nice-to-have to have a better sense of trust, but given the unofficial ones are open source, it’s quite likely any maliciousness would be rooted out very quickly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Or, if you are running one of those distros you could just take the .deb and repackage it for whatever distro you're running. Expecting a project to package for every distro, and then be required to support them for every release is a lot of work. And unfortunately some people have no issues expecting from others, but baulk at the idea of doing it themselves.