Linux

I remember the good ole days when nobody cared enough about Linux to spread malware to it. Sigh. All these techbros that need to j their d to their power trips, dystopian surveillance, and shitty AI companies have probably started this. I even noticed a Linux hate sub on Lemmy. Imagine there being enough people forced to use Linux to create a hate community where they favor Microslop. Such strange times we live in.

"Foreign hackers"

Foreign to who?

The article never said "foreign", you made that up.

OP is not a bot

AUR is still working as intended. It’s basically a public wiki of shell scripts, it was never intended to be secure in the first place. It has always been the user’s responsibility to review everything or avoid using it.

And don't forget that a system compromise means you need to re-install all in order to re-gain control of your system. Without the malware of course.

Edit: I see downvotes... Some people don't seem to understand why running malware permanently destroys a system's integrity. I do not have more time today - can somebody explain for me why?

To be clear, -Qm displays installed packages not currently in the repositories. This will include AUR packages, but I avoid the AUR (except for davmail years ago) every once in a while I'll run it just to check and sometimes it finds packages.

When you install things from the main repos the dependencies get installed too, and if those dependencies are no longer needed they'll be removed from the repositories. (I also have a bad habit of forgetting --asdeps when installing optional dependencies.) Sometimes they'll conflict with a new dependency and pacman will ask to remove and replace them, but other times the functionality has become a part of an existing package, so with no conflict to prompt removal they'll just sit unused on your install. If you haven't tried -Qm in a long while you'll probably find a few harmless currently-unused packages that were installed through the normal repos. (-Qdt will cover the other cases where dependencies remain in the repos but are now only needed for packages you don't have installed.)

Obviously -Qm will also show removed packages that aren't dependencies, a few years back my preferred pdf viewer was removed from the repositories.

-Qm will also find manually installed packages that aren't in the AUR if you ever do that.

Here are some scripts that can help too

(Edit: apparently i need to say to read and understand what these scripts are doing before running them. If you don't understand what you're running then don't run them) https://gist.github.com/Kidev/85756c3dcad3623ca5604a8135bafd14

Anyone can publish his PKGBUILD script on their codeberg or github page.

Debian users should receive their news 6-12 months after everyone else, change my mind

/s

Huh, you really feel schadenfreude over another reputable project being hit by/having to deal with malware? And all the people who might be affected by it?

That is not something that would ever cross my mind.

Whoa, this is blowing up. Chill, guys. I really think that sucks. If anything, with Arch being bleeding edge and all of that, at least you're showing early the tough wake up the other distros will have to do in relation to malware after Linux' increasing popularity. Time to brush those SELinux and apparmor bits, even.

But, now, we Debian users are okay, (btw, 😎).

Upside to Debian! Never have to worry about shit like this. Downside to Debian, you have to use Debian.

Me, a NixOS user, watching folks fighting over a bunch of legacy distros 😎😎😎

Nothing says "socialist vibes" like gloating over other Linux users

arch doesn't ship an aur helper pre installed. It's the derivates leeching the arch aur infrastructure and preinstalling aur helpers suggesting it's safe to use as is

It's just a repository of user-contributed packages. It's no different malware-ability-wise to, say, GitHub. If you are running code you found from a stranger on the internet then you are liable for it, and you need to do your due diligence in checking that you are not running malware. It is a good thing that the AUR exists because it means Arch user packages are all in one centralised repository instead of scattered across GitHub, Sourceforge, Codeberg, Pastebin, forums, whatever. If you are just installing random AUR packages then that's on you. It's basic internet safety to not automatically trust random scripts you find on the internet.

AUR has never been a good idea. I don’t use it and this news proved me right.

But is Arch sufficiently complete without AUR packages? It is being criticized - and rightly so - that the magnificient Arch Wiki is full of references to AUR packages. That could in fact mislead new users.

I am an happy Arch user, since about ten years... But I use it differently. I am running Debian stable on the hardware, which has all the drivers I need (after getting rid of NVidia graphics, which was just a mistake to buy). I use Debian for my work / office / productivity system, to read email, and so on.

But for some stuff, I need newer software: For trying out new features or libraries (I am a developer). For testing out new window managers. Leisure programming. And so on. I use Arch for this. After a few years of dual booting (which caused occasional breakage), I settled on running Arch in a VM. Which works fine for me.

And the last shift I am experiencing is that I use more and more the Guix package manager. The reason for this is that when one tries out a lot of things, and does only system upgrades for many years (which means not doing a reinstall, but replacing the oldstable packages with the newer stable packages), the system becomes a bit untidy over time. Old packages, scripts, and configurations accumulate, and it is hard to get rid of it without breaking things, because one just cannot delete everything one does not remember what it was needed for. And there is so much stuff in software that, after all, turns out to be not such a good idea. Yes, a fresh OS install leaves a tidy system, but it would cost a few days. (By the way, accumulating cruft in the long term is also somewhat of an disadvantage of rolling release distros.)

Now, Guix solves that, because I have a temporary, deterministic environment for every programming project (just like a Python venv). And by this way, stuff does not contaminate the base system, and is garbage collected when it is not used any more.

And, Guix has quite recent packages, similar to Arch.

Now I use Arch less and less.

Minimizing the chance of malware being spread through their means.

Right. And there is another angle to that: It is far easier to turn an ecosystem into a breeding ground for malware, than to get rid of it again. Once a system has a reputation to be easily hackable, it attracts malware like spoiled meat attracts flies.

Sometimes it's as simple as "because they can".

They can do this so they did. Its likely no deeper then that.

I use arch btw, it's only effecting the arch user repository, which lives separately from the maintained repositories, it's not even possible to download stuff from there with pacman. Really it's just a community space, I also have packages there. You can download pre-packaged apps, so if you install them, you will be able to remove them with pacman. I think it's a great concept.

it's like a forum where some jerk writes "use 'sudo rm -rf /' to speed up the computer". Except you don't have to read it to execute their plan.

Flathub is also concerning btw. But at least those apps are containers (with too much permissions)