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That was an eye-opening read, especially the part about Briar. I can understand closing an issue to reduce developer load, but deleting it to censor mentions of specific apps? Almost dystopian. Thanks for keeping an open mind, it's essential if you want to survive in the privacy and security community, which is so full of drama and ego.

It sounds like most other users install it that way too. Which surprises me, since I had thought the Linux community had started to move towards Flatpaks. But anybody who searched Flathub for Tor Browser, would have seen the flatpak with the Tor Project author listed as verified, and there would be no indication that this was in fact an unstable installation.

Ah my mistake, yes a social media post or blog post from them would have been nice

Sorry I just read the GrapheneOS thread on the F-Droid signature pinning issue (the same issue I linked in the last paragraph of my first comment in fact), and I just wanted to add some comments. While I agree with most of the discussion there, the problem is that the alternatives are worse. Obtainium just pulls binaries directly from Github, where developer accounts have been compromised before. The Play Store has tons of malicious apps.

One of the main benefits of F-Droid is that they have standards. If you get an app from the default F-Droid repo, you can be reasonably certain that it is open-source and private. There are many apps like Bitwarden that couldn't get included, and when you read the F-Droid Gitlab discussions on why, there are always good reasons. F-Droid will also warn you about telemetry and tracking, even if the app makes it into the default repo. These are things that Obtainium or the Play Store simply don't provide.

The official GrapheneOS account wrote:

F-Droid automatically downloads and builds code, so despite their false marketing it does not protect users from the developers in any real way

Yes this does protect users. As I've mentioned before, it's all too common for developers to sell their project to malicious third parties (often happens for browser extensions), or for developer accounts to be compromised (often happens for software packages, like NPM or PyPI). In these cases, the attackers will almost always change the pre-compiled binaries without updating the published source code. The only way to defend against this is via reproducible builds. F-Droid has been pushing for this, and the number of apps supporting reproducible builds has been growing year by year. Still, even without reproducible builds, I would rather trust F-Droid to protect their signing keys and accounts, rather than trust every app developer to do the same. After all, it only takes one compromised developer to compromise your phone.

Lastly, in the same comment by the GrapheneOS account, they said

If you continue to misrepresent, downplay and deny the many real issues about F-Droid, you'll no longer be participating in our community.

This is very worrying to me, and makes me wary to participate in their community in the first place. As I just explained above I don't agree with their logic, and now I see that this person is flaunting the fact that they can ban people for whatever they consider "misrepresentation"? I hope that the GrapheneOS community will recognize the dangers of centralizing all moderation power to somebody who seems so self-righteous.

Anyways I just wanted to share my thoughts on the thread, but thanks for the discussion as well, I bookmarked a lot of the links you shared and will be sharing them in the future!

secureblue includes modified images of CoreOS called securecore. While this doesn’t fix the issue you described, it is worth mentioning as a (technically) more secure option than both Debian and CoreOS.

Honestly I would not recommend securecore or secureblue for security. Small team, no track record, very little funding. I doubt their patches are audited by third-parties, and their userbase is probably so small that bugs are not found quickly. I'm sure you've already seen this PrivacyGuides thread on secureblue but the project is still very unstable. Their ideas may sound nice in theory, but patches can end up introduces more vulnerabilities than they fix. There are going to be breakages, changes in recommendations, bugs, regressions, and all of these impact security. I would not recommend it until their userbase is larger. You might ask how their userbase could ever get larger by my logic, which is why I'll say that I'll only recommend it for users who care about contributing and supporting the project, and improving the security of the future, even if it means sacrificing a bit of their own security at the present.

From my experience, having a large userbase and strong track record are the most reliable indicators for good security. You can always find articles criticizing old projects for security issues, but that's simply because new projects aren't under the same scrutiny (GrapheneOS is a rare exception). This is why I recommend Fedora Workstation/Silverblue over secureblue, Debian over CoreOS and securecore, and F-Droid over Accrescent. Though if you want to fight for a better future and test drive the hot new stuff, all the power to you.

I get what you're saying, but at the same time if every developer released software as pre-compiled binaries on their website, installing stuff on Linux would become such a PITA. (This is different from how Windows works because apps for Windows are distributed using installers like xxx.msi, and Linux does not have a unified installation system across distros)

I've had the opposite experience, and started using Flatpaks after running into dependency conflicts once or twice when updating my system. Though I admit I've run into bugs with Flatpaks as well, just nothing as painful as a dependency conflict.

It's impossible to know for sure whether you are tracked or not, but even the most basic fingerprinting mechanisms check browser version, and Reddit has advanced fingerprinting mechanisms to detect ban evasion. Couple that with the fact that 90% of my searches led me to Reddit, and it's easy to conclude that Reddit correlated all my visits using my fingerprint, and thus has a history of all the things I have searched and been interested in for the past year, and sold that to Google. And Google has enough data on me from back when I used to use Google services, that they were probably able to link that activity to my real identity.

It sounds as though you were aware of this bug already. How did you find out? Did you notice it yourself or was there a notification somewhere?

You are right I should have linked directly to the workaround, sorry. Glad you got it sorted out though.

the point of tor is not to avoid fingerprinting, it’s to blend in

Fingerprinting and blending in are the same thing. You can't blend in if you have a unique fingerprint. The Tor Project goes to great lengths to mitigate fingerprinting using their custom browser, it's one of their main goals. It's pointless to use Tor with a regular browser that doesn't have those protections, because websites can just identify you by your fingerprint even when you are obfuscating your IP using Tor.

You are no more tracked by Reddit than you would be with up to date tor

Browser version is a major part of your fingerprint. It's in your user agent, but that can be faked so there are additional mechanisms that check what javascript features your browser supports to get a more reliable read of your browser version. Use https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ to learn more.

And fingerprinting is not a hack or exploit. It's something that websites use for tracking, just like cookies. And I'm almost certain that Reddit fingerprints users to detect ban evasions.

Technically rollbacks are possible using regular packages, but in practice multiple packages will share dependencies and prevent you from downgrading just one of them. This is why it's important that Flatpaks isolate dependencies between apps.