It's funny how these people say Linux security is bad because random people can upload arbitrary files to AUR, but won't say Windows security is bad because random people can upload arbitrary files to Microsoft GitHub.

I think the wrongful notion comes from the fact that the vast majority of Arch users use and speak about AUR as if it were a part of arch proper, only paying lip service to reviewing PKGBUILDS, etc. They wrap the default package manager in one that supports AUR and never touch it directly again. It feels closer to if all of GitHub was available in one click through the Microsoft store or windows update.

And unfortunately that’s how arch is mainly marketed by its users. “Arch has the latest everything, if it’s not in the repos it’s on AUR” is one of the standard selling points.

Of course that speaks to how people use linux insecurely not how Linux is insecure.

Most AUR "helpers" show you the PKGBUILD and/or a diff thereof and ask you to confirm that it looks ok before continuing the install. At least by default.

Maybe most users just ignore that and always answer yes without inspecting it. I don't know. But the wiki for the AUR and Readmes for many of these tools have warning banners telling you not to blindly trust AUR packages.

There are subtle things like abusing how github handles forks which can make malicious PKGBUILD a matter of just changing the rev with no hint in the file itself.

Perhaps, but it would be pretty unusual to use a commit/hash id instead of a version tag, or the main development branch.

There is much stuff which isn't in the AUR at all, or if so in versions similar to debian default, and/or orphaned.

Nonetheless, the full tray is just one yay away, which also speaks git.

How you use such tools is totally up to you.

So far I've been unaffected by the AUR hickups, running Cachy for about 2 years now.

But I've been always wary about the AUR, trying to minimize its use. Even in the phase where I used pure Arch for several years. It tends to get messy. So less AUR is less mess.

MS-Windows gets attacked by the hardware vendors, too.

>More so than, say, Windows? Really?

significantly so. Windows has a coherent story when it comes to permissions and access. Differentiated out access controls, least privilege, UAC, mandatory integrity control and all configured out of the box.

Without AppArmor or SElinux correctly configured, which it isn't on most desktop distributions in the linux world most of your apps can still read anything, there's little sandboxing. The NT Kernel was designed with an object model in mind so you always had the abilities to have rich descriptions and policies for whatever you're handling where all of that is bolted on unix systems after the fact.

>Windows has a coherent story when it comes to permissions and access.

Yet that doesn't seem to matter much for stealer malware.

it does matter, things like the Data Protection API do meaningfully reduce what you can extract from a windows system.

Of course Windows regardless has taken the brunt of the attacks because it ran virtually every desktop machine in the world so people go after users anyway. Desktop Linux systems where never economically interesting for malware. But now that they have gained a modicum of traction they're going to get the exact same treatment, hence this thread.

Microsoft doesn't advertise it much but they do have the advantage of controlling their build environments, software is signed etc. A system like the AUR where you pull in unsigned packages from anonymous people with so many arch users relying on it is not going to be easy to address. It lived on security through obscurity.

>Data Protection API do meaningfully reduce what you can extract from a windows system

It's not meaningfully reduced. The stealer just has to call CryptUnprotectData before uploading it. It's not even like it will show a suspicious prompt to the user, without having to do anything extra the stealer can silently decrypt it.

I agree with the rest of the post though.

I would say most Linux desktops users are aggressively sandboxing everything. All my dev envs are sandboxed, trivially, Claude is sandboxed, and all my apps are flatpak. And I do actually revoke permissions for flatpaks often, although most are real good about it - using xdg-directory and such.

Maybe I’m a minority, but the tools are very mature and easy to use IMO. In windows land people are still installing random EXEs, that’s the reality.

I never claimed that and in fact Windows has had a lot of malware written for it proving it too has bad security.

There are more ways to attack people than third party software depos.

Yes. Windows has had a built in antivirus for 14 years