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?
As a maintainer of another unofficial flatpak:
You can always check the source code of the flatpak (code that downloads the dev then runs it inside the flatpak sandbox) here: https://github.com/flathub/org.signal.Signal
Any of the current maintainers could add malicious code, but that would ruin their GitHub & by proxy:Twitter,LinkedIn credibility.
Flathub have final say on what is built and hosted on their flatpak repository (Flathub != Flatpak) and are able to remove versions at will.
Personally I don’t understand the large warnings on flatpaks built by others, by that logic you should get a warning sign each time you download from the Ubuntu community apt repository.
OSS is built out of love, and to me this warns guilty before proven innocent.
Just because something is built out of love does not make it safe, and attestation is about safety. You wouldn’t trust an un-attested surgical device, just because there’s a really positive community around its design.
Signal is a life-or-death app for some people.
I’m not a developer so I can’t really check myself
I just read through the unofficial Flathub Flatpak for Signal and it is very simple. It fetches the .deb from Signal’s website, installs it in the sandbox, and uses a launcher script to tell the OS some basic toggles like should it start minimized or should it display a tray icon. In the script it makes use of zypak, which to my understanding is to tell electron (chromium) to allow sandboxing to be handled by Flatpak. Here is the repo and the build instructions is the .yaml file.
OP, what distro are you running? You mention a whole bunch of package formats they don’t provide, but never mention what format you require. Depending on the distro, making a build script (or converting the .deb) really isn’t Rocket Surgery ™.
Signal aims to be the messenger you can tell your grandma to use. To live up to that promise they have to provide more packages.
What percentage of Signal users is “grandma” that uses Linux and would be messaging from her PC? I would have to imagine the overwhelming vast majority of Signal users are on mobile only, so packaging for specific distros is probably far down the priority list.
Could always do what looks like the Arch AUR package is doing and build it yourself from source. Or if you are running a Fedora/OpenSuse distro you could find a package on COPR or something that converts a package from a .deb to .rpm and just change source and stuff to match signal.
Sounds like a hacky way to do things, I don’t think I’m comfortable with that.
Building from source is the opposite of hacky. It’s the recommended way to deal with things like this where you are concerned about trust and security. I understand that it’s not something you’ve done before, but it not as complicated as it sounds. There are many tutorials on how to build programs from source.
I understand that providing official packages for fedora/rhel, Ubuntu/debian, and arch-based distro packages along with a flatpack and Appimage would make a lot of sense, but for whatever reason, signal has decided not to. Perhaps you can message the signal team to ask why they choose not to do this.
