

This might be a silly question, but in what ways did it get worse? Is it the size of the keyboard changing, the predictions not being as good anymore or something else?
With my knowledge of tech companies, I’m not exactly surprised, but I’m not an iPhone user and struggling to understand how a keyboard of all things could get worse.

You can trust the software in your distro’s repositories (if you run a distro with well-maintained repositories). This is because, generally only well-known software gets packaged, the packager should be familiar with both the project and the code, and everything is rebuilt on the distro’s own infrastructure, to ensure that a given binary actually corresponds to the source.
It might still be possible for things to slip through, but it’s certainly much safer than random programs from online.