this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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The Windows equivalent of this would basically be the discovery that a bunch of apps on the Microsoft Store were infected with malware.
This really sucks for people that migrated to Linux without becoming Linux experts, and chose a friendly distro based on Arch that came with the AUR, like the often-recommended CachyOS.
The packages on the AUR are all user created. It's not really comparable to the Microsoft Store.
Is the Microsoft Store not full of apps not created by Microsoft?
It's apps approved by Microsoft. They only made a small fraction of them.
And the AUR is not currently accepting registrations, so some degree of vetting is clearly happening in both cases. I don't know how stringent for either.
This wasn't supposed to be a perfect one to one comparison, just an interesting sidenote lol
I think they're currently taking extra precautions, because of this event. I don't think they were vetting users before. Regardless, it's significantly less controlled than the Microsoft store. The equivalent of that is the official repository, not the user repository.
AUR is not the official repository. Its more like downloading a virus from Mlcrosoft.com.
The AUR is hosted on https://aur.archlinux.org/.
Just like how Microsoft hosts the Microsoft Store.
That's like saying that github is equivalent to the Microsoft store. Sure, they provide the space for the repository. It's controlled by users though, as the name implies. It isn't the official repository, like the Microsoft store is the official "repository" for Windows.
Yeah, perfect analogy. No amount of external helper tools making installs from GitHub easier would change the security implications. (Cargo-binstall is an example of such a helper.)
You mean like this?
https://www.howtogeek.com/788382/beware-of-malware-in-windows-apps-on-the-microsoft-store/
If it was the actual apps and not just look-alikes, yes.
There is a reason why the arch community had such a bad reputation when it came to newcomers, they were gate keeping good technical knowledge of the system. It had the side effect that most people became royal dicks on the forums and stopped being helpful, but it did have what I would consider the intended effect of people being wary of everything they did on their system.
I find the easy arch distros to be fairly interesting since my recommendation has always been that anyone who wants to daily drive an arch distro should install arch through command line at least once and read about the packages they use. I personally run endeavor os, but I started by doing the leg work, which led me to the conclusion that I prefer flatpaks over aur if it is available because they are far more easier to maintain good security practices on.
I think that's a silly thing to say given that the arch wiki is the most comprehensive source of up to date technical Linux knowledge available to everybody. If you mean support for people on the distro itself, it does explicitly market itself to people who are already knowledgeable and willing to be their own support, so idk what you'd expect
CachyOS is completely 100% unaffected UNLESS people chose to install applications from the AUR.
You could literally say the same thing about Arch though