The Linux Mint Software Manager now loads faster and is more secure

The head of the Linux Mint project, Clem Lefebvre, has announced that work has been done on the Linux Mint Software Manager to improve its speed and security. As the central location for installing new software, it’s good that users won’t have to wait forever for stuff to load.

According to the blog post, the Software Manager will appear instantly when pressed, and the window will be populated more quickly than before. On the security front, you now have an option in the settings to show unverified Flatpak packages, this is off by default and it’s not recommended to enable it either.

For those not familiar, Flatpaks are a relatively new Linux packages that come with all their dependencies bundled so that you don’t have errors installing them, they’re also sandboxed for more security.

Aside from letting users know that allowing unverified Flatpaks is not recommended, the team has also included a more in-depth warning that lets users know the Flatpak in question hasn’t been approved by the developers and could be maintained by anyone. It goes on to say an unverified Flatpak could be malware, and therefore, you should not enable support for these packages.

If you do enable unverified Flatpaks, you will see a red warning for these apps on their product pages that reads “Unverified Flatpak.” This can help ensure you don’t accidentally install an unofficial Flatpak that could be loaded with malware.

Presumably, these improvements to the Software Manager will ship with Linux Mint 22, which is based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Strangely, we normally get a new Linux Mint version just a month after the Ubuntu release, but so far, there is still no news of a release date, and not even the beta ISOs are being tested yet.

Usually, we get a beta ISO released for about two weeks so that bugs can be fixed, and then we get the final version.

Source: Linux Mint

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