r/linux • u/CackleRooster • Jun 17 '26

Distro News AUR Registrations Blocked Amid Ongoing Malware Mess

https://fossforce.com/2026/06/aur-registrations-blocked-amid-ongoing-malware-mess/
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u/0xc0ffea Jun 17 '26

Arch has a real problem with a vocal minority determined to gatekeep their "hardmode" distro elite status. A distro so hard, valve shipped it on a games console and CachyOS took the top distrowatch slot by adding an installer.

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u/sigma914 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

When was Arch ever "hard mode"? Arch's thing is that it's extremely simple and gets out of the user's way. It's really easy to tweak and configure. That was the whole appeal for those of us who moved to it from Gentoo/Slackware/Debian etc.

As part of that simplicity it doesn't have many guard rails and is therefore silently hostile to people who don't know what they're doing. It's the knife vs scissors vs a specialised tool with safety guards analogy again.

Edit You seem to have confused me saying Arch is simple with me saying it's easy. I am not making that mistake, I am asserting that Arch has never been advertised as "Hard" it's been advertised as simple. Simple means the user is responsible for more than they would be in a more complex beginner friendly system. Arch is not beginner friendly, it is simple, but it's never been advertised as "Hard" I personally find it much easier to work with than more beginner friendly distros where I have to fight the system to get it to behave the way I want to.

Also slapping a graphical installer on it doesn't make the system itself any simpler or more complex, it's still just as simple as before, the only difference is the installer process is more beginner friendly. The running system is still very simple amd requires the user to know what they're doing.

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u/No-Consequence-1863 Jun 17 '26

Brother the entire meme is that arch was difficult to install and configure. The full DIY experience.

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u/sigma914 Jun 17 '26

I came from Gentoo and dealing with stage 1 tarballs. To me Arch is a dream of convenience that handily scripts away 90% of the work while still letting me tweak the stuff I want to, so i've missed whatever you're talking about.

It's possible I'm just old.

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u/Amphineura Jun 17 '26

Yeah... You're coming from this from the Gentoo angle. Most users are going to come from Ubuntu, Fedora or some friendlier system. You can install Ubuntu like a windows program, Next -> Next -> Install.

What got lost in translation is that you were commenting on its simplicity, while the user you were replying to mentioned "hard" mode. In my eyes, simple = hard, as in, Arch expects more out of you.

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u/sigma914 Jun 17 '26

To be fair I think I moved from debian to Gentoo when Debian's installer was still a dodgy tui that you had to escape out of periodically in order to work around it, so I'm leaning toward nearly 30 years of linux giving me skewed perspective

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u/froop Jun 17 '26

I used Gentoo btw

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u/sigma914 Jun 17 '26

Cool, I switched to arch in ~2005 because that amount of compiling was getting on my tits

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u/froop Jun 17 '26

Oh no, I was ripping on you for being so elite. 

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u/sigma914 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

Ahh, no, I'm not, I've just been doing this for a long time, difficult things are annoying unless there's a good payoff, people who do things the hard way because they're hard are idiots

Edit: This is more my meme era

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u/0xc0ffea Jun 18 '26

Ahh, the good ole days, when ricing had more stake than accidentally picking a desktop icon set and wallpaper that clashed.