[Barrin92]

There's always been this security theater of people recommending arch because they "don't trust the companies" or Canonical or what have you but frankly I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner. Well or maybe it has and we don't know.

Running random binaries on your computer uploaded by some anonymous dude has to be the equivalent of buying heart medicine on craigslist. And because Arch is so barebones to begin with the AUR is very popular, you see a lot of arch users using it.

[h4ck_th3_pl4n3t]

Arch bugfix time is usually within 24 hours.

Not a single enterprise distro even reacts within that timeframe. OVAL advisories are weeks, sometimes months later.

As long as you don't have a virtualization approach similar to QubesOS, any linux distro will not fix this problem. Because that's not how separation of concerns works in the POSIX system. You need to have separate users for each and every program to isolate them, and that is practically unfeasible.

[homebrewer]

I agree, it's much better in Ubuntu land where you simply won't have the software at all, will shrug your shoulders and go on with your life.

AUR helpers make reviewing changes to AUR packages a trivial matter that takes about 2 minutes of my life per month. In exchange I get easy access to software that isn't packaged for Ubuntu and probably never will be, because building debs and going through the process of upstreaming them is roughly comparable to getting a PhD (if anyone is even interested in your debs, which they probably won't be).

[WD-42]

How exactly is Arch barebones? It basically ships with everything I need, more than most distros (Zed and Discord are good examples). I don't even need to use the AUR.

[Barrin92]

Just by taking a glance at the most popular packages (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages)

Pretty much every browser that isn't Firefox including Chrome, VS Code, most proprietary software like Slack, Zoom, Spotify, many vpn clients and password managers, a lot of them seemingly not published by the companies in question.

All of those ancillary password, vpn or security related products who aren't going to be in the main repo because they have proprietary elements and also rely on random people seems particularly bad. And there's a lot of software in that category.

[BearOso]

Chrome is in the main repos as chromium. VS Code is the "code" package. I don't know what vpn clients you're referring to, but networkmanager is built-in and has support for openvpn and wireguard.

Yes, proprietary software has to be installed separately, but for things like cloud password managers you're already putting your trust someplace else. You're also not likely to be hit by out of these flyby attacks, because the stuff people want is popular and has people watching it constantly and reputable people maintaining it. These patch/fix packages are suspicious looking and probably didn't have a single person touch them.

[WD-42]

And what distro does package those?

That's what Flatpak is for. If you must install crappy proprietary software, at least get an official package from the developer.

[homebrewer]

> And what distro does package those?

nix, which has its own share of problems.

[abacate]

> nix, which has its own share of problems.

Care to elaborate?

[homebrewer]

Some of those packages (like Brave) are maintained by original developers, it depends on the package.

Most aren't, but it's trivial to review changes to packages (all good AUR helpers show the diff on upgrades, an 99% of time the changes are hash and version, nothing else).

So you only need to check the package once, which the documentation reminds you to do about fifty times. Otherwise — play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

If the package has any popularity at all, you will get lots of paranoid users who will eat you alive and report to Arch maintainers right away if you do anything suspicious, try to link a binary from some weird website instead of the upstream URL, or even just omit the GPG signature verification key when it's available.