After repeatedly suffering issues with scam apps making it onto the Snap Store, Canonical maker of Ubuntu Linux have now decided to manually look over submissions.
Packages are usually not official but maintained by your distro, so there are pretty strict controls, especially on Linux Mint Debian edition. Flatpaks on the other hand come from flathub and are less controlled, but since they’re sandboxed the security is still good. If you open the website you can see which apps are verified (official) and which aren’t. Flatpaks also have more user reviews in the most cases
Packages are usually not official but maintained by your distro, so there are pretty strict controls, especially on Linux Mint Debian edition. Flatpaks on the other hand come from flathub and are less controlled, but since they’re sandboxed the security is still good. If you open the website you can see which apps are verified (official) and which aren’t. Flatpaks also have more user reviews in the most cases