Not all tools are made for inexperienced people. Not everything is idiot proof. This is OK!
In my experience using the AUR:
1. when you first install the package you can read the build script (and you should). These are in a very standard structure, and if the one you are reading is weird and complicated consider not installing it. No one is forcing you to. Almost every build script I read just downloads a build from a tagged github release.
2. when you get an upgrade you are shown the diff. For almost every AUR package I use this is literally just changing the $VERSION variable and the subsequent $HASH of the download. It is trivial to see if anything (in the AUR script) is happening that is sneaky.
It's really not that scary. And if it's considered scary, there are literally dozens of other linux distros (not to mention Windows or MacOS) you could be using instead.
I'm not asking for myself. Yes, I understand the build process, and know what to check. I've also written PKGBUILDs before and have had packages in AUR. I'm sure you understand it too, as well as many people here.
But many users don't. As far as I can tell, there is very little actual guidance about what to look for, not even to the extent of what you explain here, on the wiki. Users are told to check the PKGBUILD, and warned about AUR-helpers being dangerous, but in practice, it seems AUR-helpers are widely used, and many users likely just click through PKGBUILDs they won't be able to understand.
And, again, this attack was a relatively obvious one. Other attacks could be made much harder to notice.
Worse, distributions like CachyOS are being broadly promoted to a user base who can't be reasonably expected to check over AUR packages themselves. Unlike ArchLinux, those sometimes do seem to promote AUR-helpers. In some cases, those distributions are apparently including AUR-sourced packages in their actual repositories.
Questions about these topics often result in typical Archlinux hostility. And in some sense, that's understandable: there are other distributions that most users should be using, and the frustration of people using Archlinux who shouldn't be is wearing. It is nice to have a distribution that offers the flexibility and space for experimentation that Archlinux does. It's one of the reasons I use it on some of my machines, while at the same time recommending against most others using it.
To some extent, this is just a wide cultural difficulty with Linux, and there isn't a clear answer. On one hand, you want enough gatekeeping to keep users away from potentially dangerous systems they have no interest in understanding, and that they'll rely on without understanding in situations where they shouldn't. On the other, you don't want to keep out users who are interested in learning.
> But many users don't. As far as I can tell, there is very little actual guidance about what to look for, not even to the extent of what you explain here, on the wiki. Users are told to check the PKGBUILD, and warned about AUR-helpers being dangerous, but in practice, it seems AUR-helpers are widely used, and many users likely just click through PKGBUILDs they won't be able to understand.
That's where the whole "Not everything is idiot proof" thing comes in. The distribution is pushing the responsibility on users to vet what they do, across everything, not just installing AUR packages, so naturally this also applies to installing 3rd party software.
If you don't know what to look out for, maybe don't install stuff you don't know what it will do. Sucks as an answer if the distribution is looking to "Make it as easy as possible for every user" but that's not Arch Linux ultimately, it does ask you to care about things like that, if you don't want to, it might not be the OS for you. And that's of course OK and not something bad. I know this sounds like gatekeeping, but it's more of a culture difference than anything, and probably not even a problem.
> distributions like CachyOS are being broadly promoted to a user base who can't be reasonably expected to check over AUR packages themselves
That'd suck, but not the impression I've got from CachyOS. There is a FAQ entry that seems to get the gist of AUR correct, that it's basically random software from random users, nothing is assumed safe: https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/faq/#aur-safety-pract...
> this is just a wide cultural difficulty with Linux, and there isn't a clear answer
I don't think "a answer" is needed here. What some read as "gatekeeping" and "Arch Linux hostility" is in reality just a difference of culture, and that's not a bad thing. Some distributions are for making things "easy for newcomers" or some focus on "best UI and UX" and others "most barebones for experienced users to setup themselves", and all of them as valid as the other. The tricky (and slow/time consuming) part is that you have to try a bunch before you find which one(s) aligns with your own perspectives and ideas.
Ultimately, users can learn best together with distributions that align with how they think and want to work.
>What some read as "gatekeeping" and "Arch Linux hostility" is in reality just a difference of culture, and that's not a bad thing.
Oddly enough, when I was writing that, I wasn't thinking about Arch, but Ubuntu. Years ago, I can remember a situation of a PPA being used for developing something I was involved in somehow, and while the PPA specifically noted that users shouldn't use it, they just did anyway, because they wanted what they saw as the latest and greatest versions of those packages. When the PPA owner added a package that set the default wallpaper to a warning about adding the PPA and updating all packages from it blindly, the users blamed them, rather than understanding the message. At the same time, I was actually using that repository legitimately, and it was useful.
So 100%, I agree that it's highly dangerous that the distro's the next tranche of people unfamiliar with linux (gamers dissatisfied with Windows) move over with, are based on hecking Arch. It feels like a massive upcoming footgun.
I think the issue is those repos being based on Arch though, not Arch itself.
To be fair, among all the linux users I know, no one except developers/cs-adjacent would actually get hit by this. The point is that "noob users" use packages that are, to put it short, maintained by a big company. Or it's something that's there in the official repos. And the big companies always maintain their own supply chain till the end, i.e they maintain their aur packages or their curl | bash endpoint themselves. So it ends up being alright.
Stuff that tinkerers use is often some random fork of a fork of a gitHub repo, maintained by someone else, and the aur package maintained by a fourth person. That's where the mess is. Thankfully, these are also the users you can expect to read a pkgbuild diff.