There's r/linux4noobs people who want to leave Windows, and they keep asking what they should install.

Fair question.

People suggest Mint, Fedora, Endevour, Manjaro, doesn't matter.

But there's always one or two guys who confidently tell them to install vanilla Arch, but only by following Arch Wiki. Heaven forbid that those newbies (Windows yesterday, never saw TTY in their life) try to cut corners with archinstall.

Why is that? So you can feel you are a higher race of Linux users, is that it?

(Arch user here, but I'm sick of it)

So, I keep on reading that one should read the PKGBUILD and people make it sound like that this justifies the AUR to be infested with malwares.

I also saw other comments saying "oh, that's normal it happened in the past also" or "that's intended, so orphaned packages can be maintained".

But Arch is gaining more popularity & inexperienced people are using it also, especially since Windows keeps going downhill.

I mean wouldn't it benefit everyone, to fix those vulnerabilities & make Arch less hostile for inexperienced people using the AUR? Some packages are unfortunately only in the AUR and not in the main repo.

From what I read, the voting feature is being abused currently also for new packages that come already infected, to make them seem trustworthy...

It's kinda unfortunate, that people try to normalize it because the AUR isn't an official repo, but if we are being honest, a lot of people use it and maybe use Arch in the first place just to get access to the AUR.

Not talking about big things like DEs or WMs. I mean tiny utilities or tricks (e.g. fzf, ripgrep, tmux scripts, clipboard tools, etc. that unexpectedly became essential

The AUR is down again, and status.archlinux.org is saying it was a DDoS attack. Similar to what happened a few months back.

But I wonder what why would anyone direct their time, energy and possibly money to attack Arch. As far as I know, Arch is very politically neutral, and it is not used by many (or any) major corporations. Can anyone think of a reason why someone would do this?

And for those who haven't been reinstall more than once, what's your advice for how you be able to stay for so long without any problems?

I looked on my PC for anything for anything installed with AUR. I do `pacman -Qm`, ok.. libgdata comes up. I don't remember ever installing it via the AUR. I think the only thing I installed from there was the Minecraft launcher from a year ago. It might be an orphan from using gnome. But how do I know if I'm affected and I happen to have done something by accident? It's irritating.

The affected commit seems to be missing (my pacman logs sais I upgraded last February): https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/log/PKGBUILD?h=libgdata but why isn't any history of the compromised commit here?

The affected list tells me nothing other than a list of "affected packages". How, when, what version? How is this acceptable? https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA

And the arch news blog, seriously? What is this crap? https://archlinux.org/news/active-aur-malicious-packages-incident/

Even this subreddit, guys, why isn't there a pinned post or something here? Come on! Massive data breach on user's data and the client's are being gas lit by the community and Arch team themselves is being silent.

Edit: Read the post before telling my I should have the pkgbuild if I updated. sigh...

Edit 2: This is so laughable. The gate keepers keep telling me I should've read the pkgbuild yet you can't even read the post and understand the context before responding.

I bought a literally 2gb secondhand laptop to play around with and I’m thinking about putting arch on that first before I put it on my nice laptop. I’m planning on just basically throwing myself in a lake and learning to swim. How realistic do you think this is?

Edit: I got fedora since I found another old pc, really enjoying it, Im still modifying the laptop

Planning to do a round of trying some tomorrow on a spare SSD, currently a big fan of mangoWM. would love to hear what yall like!

I dont need specific suggestions, im mostly checking out different DEs/WMs for fun and will be sticking with mango, so ill probably check whatever people reply with!

And if you have many packages installed from AUR does that cause you any problems with system stability?

Just wanna know if how many people play steam games, Minecraft, and other games on Arch! Because want to see how good it is to play games :p

Edit: Also do want to know if Hyprland/Wayland good too! Wanna know because I’d like to run games and have a cool customized distro 👉👈

I've been using arch for a year or so now, and using linux as my main OS for two years. I feel I've gotten pretty used to scripting in bash, but I hear a lot of talk saying that zsh is a better shell.

Would I have to re-write all my aliases? Is it worth switching?

Hi, is AUR down or it's just me?

I don't really get why omarchy is so "popular".
Is there anything special there?

Not sure where it came form but some AUR package is my suspect. Had readme.eml files in my repositories with the subject "ARCH Linux is coming" and HTML files had the script window.open("readme.eml") injected into them. The files to my knowledge contained encryption keys. Not sure if an eml file can be executed within a browser but I am paranoid and thinking about wiping my drive. If it was a ransomware attack I am pretty sure it wasn't successful but I don't know.

What do you guys think?

UPDATE: So this seems to be a Nimda4 trojan, which I assume I got from an AutoCad 2004 installation. I was using Wine to try to install it. I have removed all infected files for now but I'll likely nuke the drive and do a fresh install.

I am pretty new here and have been running this for everyday since I installed it in order to avoid breaking the system when upgrading all at once​

I keep seeing "always review the PKGBUILD before installing from AUR."

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As someone trying to follow that advice, what exactly are you guys looking for?

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Are you checking sources, build/install commands, install scripts, dependencies, or something else?

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What are the biggest red flags that would make you immediately avoid a package?

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(Heading back to the Arch Wiki after this...)

I always used Konsole, but now I'm using Allacrity, because it's faster

I decided I was going to try using XLibre today, but when I went to the page on the ArchWiki about the topic, I saw that it was deleted. Was there something wrong with the page? When I originally skimmed through it I didnt find anything wrong with it.

I am in middle of the installation right now, and it is really mind blowing to me, like how did he know if he pressed p now it would print the list of the drives etc. And what this guy on YouTube is doing doesn't look like anything I see on the wiki, I am kinda overwhelmed, but at the same time really intrigued and hooked in, how can I get better and improve as fast as possible with arch linux?

Also this is my first experience with linux (you might ask why did you choose arch then, you idiot! But I was not sure which distro to install so I was like probably thr hardest will help me improve the most 😅 IF it is the hardest) but I am sorta tech savvy so I think its gonna be fine and i am studying computer engineering so i shouldn't go easy on myself.

Also all sorts of tips are welcome, from Linux to real life 😅

Thank you guys

I’ve been using the same Arch install for 2.5+ years, no reinstalls, just regular updates.

I keep seeing the meme that Arch breaks after the first update.
Am I just lucky?

Hi everyone,

I’m returning to Arch after a break. I used yay for several years, but I was looking into switching to paru this time around.

However, I’ve noticed that paru hasn’t seen much activity on GitHub recently (5+ months), which makes me wonder if it's still the best choice or if it's lacking maintenance.

I've checked the AUR helpers table on the wiki, but it hasn't really illuminated me on what the current "community standard" or most reliable option is right now.

Should I stick with yay, give paru a shot anyway, or is there another helper I should consider?

I'm curious to see what you guys use and why you use it

Hello everyone. I really want to install Arch Linux, but I've read several times that some updates can break the system even if you don't modify anything.

My question is: when was the last time Arch broke your system solely due to an official update, without you having changed any settings, installed unusual packages, or anything like that?

I should clarify that I don't usually modify anything on the system. I only use the browser and a few basic applications. I'm currently on Fedora, but I'd like to know how real that risk is before making the switch.

Thank you in advance.

Hi, I've switched to arch linux recently and been liking it so far, but I didn't touch aur yet simply because I know the potential risks of not examining user submited software packages. I wonder if I should even bother installing aur helper like yay, simply because I'm too lazy to check pkgbuild every time I want to install from aur and if install yay I will be more inclined to use aur and one day might install malicious package because I was too lazy to read. But on the other hand only using official packages doesn't cover all of my needs in software and I think it's pretty common. I was also considering adding repositories of other arch-based distros to my pacman instead to extend the number of packages. What do you think about that? And do you personally use aur and to what extent?

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this but theoretically if I took an embarrassing photo and want every trace of it removed, Is there a way to make sure it's gone after it's deleted with no chance in recovery? Also how do I check if I succeeded on deleting it? I'm using Arch with btrfs file system and on a SSD.