skilltheamps

I think with that OP referenced a city close to where they live

What is green, or open or reclaimed about this? Let alone all of these?

Because it's the same story as with Mir or Upstart: it will die, because its half assed and tailored to Ubuntu, this time with dubious non-free parts even

The second statement is not true, the standardization is flatpak portals and they by now cover almost every aspect of the system. The screenshot api is this: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html#gdbus-org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot

I think one puzzle piece of improvement is flatpak:

• It has a verification system, such that users can see which apps are packaged by their developers. For those apps, this eliminates the need to trust a separate maintainer entirely
• It targets almost all linux distributions with a single package. This cuts down the packaging effort for covering the majority of the linux landscape so much, that the number of package maintainers required to be trusted collapses - in the ideal case to just the developers themselves as in the first bullet point
• It makes use of sandboxing, so in case of a malicious app it (in theory) only has access to the stuff the user gave it permission to.

In reality there's a plethora of problems obviously:

• verified apps are the minority
• some people don't like the additional storage needed for runtimes (although the more flatpaks you use the more runtimes can be shared and its overall impact gets smaller)
• A lot of apps do not yet use all the portals, and require the classical full access to the system to work properly (in some cases the user can still remove some permission if certain features of the application are not needed by them though). This is just a question of ongoing development work, and hopefully we reach a point in the near future where a flatpak app without tied down permissions raises eyebrows

I wholeheartedly agree, yet this is the same for stuff like the AUR, every PPA, or even just blindly copy & pasting inductions from some blog - all of which are very popular. (Just to name some examples that are closer to what op wants to do).

I still wouldn't use scripts from a random dump site because they are just likely to mess up the os with junk and cruft that will be there forever. But fundamentally from a security point of few its not necessarily worse than what many are doing - simply because it doesn't get worse than blindly executing stuff from sources missing the reputation to justify trusting them.

In terms of helluvalot less critical - is it really though? Remember that the app on your phone is also witten by them, closed source and does whatever they want with your clear-text messages. If the trustworthyness of a messaging vendor is part of the critical-ness question, e2e encryption does not add anything: Either you trust them and could also do so when they process your message on their server, or your don't and they could indeed spy on you on the proprietary client app.

End 2 end encryption is only a real benefit when the ends actually belong to the user, i.e. theres transparency about the ends being clean, which can only be shown for open source ends. If the ends are potentially compromised, there's so security / privacy guarantee.

Because the seemingly great choice of Webbrowsers in reality boils down to a risky monoculture of chromium (/its webengine). The only real alternative is Firefox/Blink. Risky, because the main driver behind Chrome-/ium (Google) is not acting on behalf of the public interest towards a free, open and privacy preserving internet. Instead they're working on a privacy exploiting one that gets locked down using DRM technologies. Them being a vendor of major parts of the internet as well as the browser to use it makes this a lethal combination. Firefox will definitely exist for as long as Google exists, because its their tool to defy claims of a monopoly, but they will do everything to keep it the small and mostly irrelevant "competitor" it is currently. Therefore, stand against Googles evil play and help Mozilla to gain some actual indipendence and leverage for keeping the internet free (as in freedom), open and privacy preserving.

There's softmaker office, it's from a german company: https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office

Have you taken care about the calendar in flatpak having access to the evolution data server in the distrobox?

You can install silverblue, and then rebase to ublue ( https://universal-blue.org/ ). Specifically to the "silverblue-nvidia" variant, and you should get a nice silverblue experience without any of the nvidia struggles, as people at the ublue project take care of that stuff for you.

And yes, distrobox is the goto solution to run stuff that is basically ubuntu-only, or by extension bound to any distro variant / version and not flatpak. This includes graphical applications. Distrobox works great, I do all my work in it.