this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Hi, there!

Newbie question here: basically, the title. Perhaps what I'm asking is pretty obvious, but I'd like to double-check with the community on this.

I use Discover on my Debian KDE Plasma set-up, with Flatpaks enabled (but not Snaps). Sometimes, I come across apps (I did just yesterday, searching for translation apps to replace DeepL), that have according to its page, an unknown author and, sometimes, even an unkown licence, but which do require access permission to the whole system (this latter requirement applying specifically to Deb packages, from what I've seen).

Under these circumstances, is it safe to assume that such apps will still be safe because of the fact that they appear listed on Discover (in other words, is Discover a guarantee of safety for the apps it shows, as in, some type of checked or proved content), or should I still be wary of potentially malicious software included on it?

Thank you very much in advance :)

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[–] Patch@feddit.uk 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

All Discover is is a graphical front end to your repositories, so the real question is "is everything in my repositories safe?".

There are no guarantees in life, but if you're using only the default official Debian repos you're just about as safe as you can get. If you add extra repos, whether deb based or flatpak, Discover will only be as safe as whatever you've hooked it up to.