So far, that seems like a very reasonable compromise for both of us.
> Yep, I sure am. I have to be picky to keep my information secure. Most people don't seem to care about that, which is why they're not as picky as I am. Sooner or later it will bite them.
I don't see your point. If it's about Microsoft's data collection, that's orthogonal to how software distribution works. Otherwise, there's no reason to trust the competence of Canonical or RedHat employees (or even volunteers for other distros) over those of Apple or Microsoft. Either one can mess up, either one can expose your system.
> Also, even supposing downloading from your website is the only alternative you give me, to do that securely, you'll have to use HTTPS, you'll have to sign your binaries with a public key I trust, you'll have to provide signed hashes so I can verify the download, etc.--in other words, all the stuff you'd have to do if you maintained a third-party PPA.
It doesn't stop at PPA, to really support all the other picky Linux guys with their distributions I need to provide dozens of packages built against the dependencies of whichever versions of those distributions are currently in use. That's the actual problem Flatpak is solving. If there was one package format that worked everywhere, it would be a different story. You can trivially download and install (compatible) deb or rpm files as well, why aren't you lamenting that being a security issue?
> And also again, if you don't supply a third-party PPA that my distro's package manager can pull updates from automatically, how are you going to ship me updates?
Your distribution could integrate Flatpak updates into its update mechanism, or you can run them manually or as a cron job.
> Or are you going to reinvent, poorly, the packaging and updating infrastructure that has already been field tested for years by distros?
Personally, the amount of times that this "packaging and updating infrastructure" has broken working applications or whole Linux installations leads me to believe that no amount of testing will ever make it work reliably. On the other hand, the software that has all its dependencies in one place, where an update consists of overwriting or replacing the installation directory, has rarely failed. On Windows, this is called "portable", on Mac OS, this is simply a regular application.
