com.bitwarden.desktop VS flatpak

> One thing I don't know about (which maybe somebody can inform me/us about): the wiki states that PRs are reviewed by Flathub reviewers, but I see no sign of human review on e.g. https://github.com/flathub/com.bitwarden.desktop/pull/167 (or others in that repo). What's the actual process?

In this case, I think the lack of human involvement is mostly a good thing. Flathub was criticised for having outdated packages[1]. Using automation to automatically update packages is mostly a good thing.

Obviously, we want to see thorough review of new packages, but that's a separate issue.

[1] I thought I read this in an LWN article, but I can't find it. But see e.g. https://github.com/flathub/org.qutebrowser.qutebrowser/issue...

for example, bitwarden's flatpak on github shows basically just repackages the official debian build into a flatpak build. in this case i think it's pretty safe (in fact i use the flatpak).

You might also be interested in learning a little about Flatpaks and downloading/installing programs from Flathub. I'll give you the basic background: It's an alternative (in some ways, honestly, modern) way of installing programs that can be sandboxed/permissioned. It's a way of releasing software that also helps ensure compatibility across a wide variety of systems. It's also a way of releasing software that can update independently from the base installation. You can think of it sort of like an app store on a phone where the programs are a bit self-contained and can update independently from the phone's operating system. https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.bitwarden.desktop

See https://github.com/flathub/com.bitwarden.desktop/issues/63

Example of an application but with Electron: https://github.com/flathub/com.bitwarden.desktop

Since we're on the subject, you can also host your own BitWarden if you wanted. Bitwarden also has a desktop client for Linux as well. Alternatively if enabled 3rd Party Repositories or just manually enabled Flathub, you can install the Bitwarden flatpak.

It's not really that much of a risk. If you look at the yaml file you can see exactly what permissions it requests and what happens when the package is built.

Luckily, Flathub is transparent in what manifests are used in the production of the Flatpaks they host. For example, this is the one for Bitwarden. You can take some time to learn how Flatpaks are built, but this one seems pretty straight forward. They are taking the .deb file from Bitwarden's github release page and extracting the executable from there. Then it adds a couple extra files, which are viewable within the manifest file, to make it into a Flatpak app.

Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.

No, it looks like you have to do it on an application basis.

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/2913

Flatpak

> CLI tools do not implement auto-complete themselves. What you are seeing are auto-complete scripts for your shell that make network connections.

nit: This is incorrect. Robust auto-complete scripts call the actual program to provide completions.

That is what Flatpak does. It is Flatpak itself that makes the network connections.

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/blob/main/completion/flat...

Not that it would make any differencen if it was implemented in Bash seeing as the Bash script is also provided by Flatpak.

The only performance impact I know of is with the seccomp filter in CPU-bound tasks: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4187

Skimming through the recent comments, there might be a way to optimize some of it.