Personally I'm grateful to not need 3rd party packages

TL;DR: Don't think of the AUR as a package source, but as of an only mildly moderated, but ultimately free and open, sharing platform for PKGBUILDs, primarily useful for (self-)packagers, not necessarily non-technical end users.

Before the AUR, you had people individually hosting their PKGBUILDs anywhere, sometimes on GitHub or the BBS (yeah, it's been a while), sometimes along with a repository URL you could add to your pacman.conf to install packages right away, and it was glorious. I didn't have to write a working PKGBUILD myself from scratch, and I could decide if I trusted that particular packager to not screw me sideways with a pre-built package. An officialized "Trusted User" (TU) role emerged from this idea, which has recently been renamed to Package Maintainer (PM). This is fundamentally still how the AUR works, it just became much bigger, and easier to search for particular software. Packagers gift to you their idea of how software should be packaged, for you to expand upon, take inspiration from, or learn, or use as-is if you determine it to be good for your purpose.

The AUR is ultimately a great resource for packagers, and still useful for users, but "true end users" get the extra repository, and community, kind of, before that, and should try to avoid the AUR if they can, or at least be prepared to put in effort to establish trust, or get help.

A handful of Package Maintainers are manually adopting and subsequently vetting for sufficiently popular packages to move them from the AUR to the official extra repository, which is deemed safe to use as-is, on a best-effort basis. Obviously, this is a bottleneck, as it is not feasible for the few volunteering PMs to adopt and maintain 10k+ AUR packages and be held to any quality standard. That's why "you are on your own" with the AUR.

On the positive side, there's a voting system to determine package popularity. AUR packagers have a public list of maintained packages, and a comprehensive git commit history. Establishing trust is still crucial, and I feel hard pressed to name a reasonably popular/useful package that isn't already in extra or has been maintained in the AUR for a long time.

The biggest risk, IMHO, for malware getting slipped into a package is orphaning a popular package, and having it adopted by a malevolent user. This is something I personally look out for. If the maintainer changed, I make sure to check the commit history to see what they did. Most of the time it's genuine fixes, but if anything is changed without a damn good and obvious reason, hit up the AUR mods and ask for help. This is how malware is spotted. Also, typically only the version is bumped in a PKGBUILD on an update, which is a change I feel safe waving through, too. If the download URI changes, or patches are added, I do look at them to determine the reason, and if that isn't explained well enough to understand, that's a red flag. Better ask someone before running this.

source: personal involvement in Arch since 2002

Thanks for the information!

Does anyone else manually review PKGBUILDs before installing or upgrading anything from the AUR?

I do, but not as closely or as often as I should. Recent malware is a reminder to be careful, I think I was starting to take the AUR for granted as a repo when really it’s still the Wild West.
Yeah, paru makes it pretty easy to do, and can also build packages in a chroot, adding some extra security.
Sort of, but I don't know what I'm looking for. It would be nice if folks explained what a bad one looks like.
- Look for comments that say "# THIS IS MALWARE"
- I determine within the PKGBUILD (which I view from octopi) the URLs where code or binaries are downloaded from and then if those URLs seem trustworthy, e.g. how many stars or maintainers the github repo has. When the repo is small and doesn't qualify for the latter criterias, I do a git clone and skim over the sources on the lookout for malicious URLs or strange code (never found anything in that regard). Also search for the package on https://aur.archlinux.org/ and look if other users have anything to say and how many votes it has.
I do, also most aur-helpers skip or make reviewing a chore.
at the risk of getting down voted I wonder if an LLM would spot it
- I don't know if it's being done, but since AI is here to stay, and these sort of tasks seem to fit with their capabilities, maybe a group could carry out testing.
Also with paru. I mainly check that the download shows the correct URL and does standard stuff with it.
Yes, always!
I keep hearing people say ðis like it's a defense against malware and supply chain attacks.
Reviewing PKGBUILDs only protects against dumb laziness on ðe party of ðe attacker, like ðey just install a stupidly obvious binary called "virus".
What are you checking for in ðe PKGBUILD?

I smell something fishy going on. I've been using the AUR for a long time and I'm now just hearing of malware?

There's been malware in the past, not only that - AUR is user submitted. It's in the name. They warn you to double check what you're installing. It is functionally similar to running a random installer you found on GitHub.
It seems like these instances are being intentionally blown out of proportion, but I don't see what there is to gain by doing that.
- It is functionally similar to running a random installer you found
  So basically how Windows users have been acquiring their software for the last 30 years.
- I don't want to say stupid things, but I have so many theories. I check the shit out of a package before installing it. I even go to the GitHub page and make sure of things.
The AUR is made up of user packages
It isn't crazy that malware made it in. It is very much a "user at your own risk." Packages are reviewed but sometimes things slip in.
- yeah, you get choice, and its better than a random closed exe in windows.
  Some people have really odd expectations of "free" and "open".
  Is there a choosingbeggars community to repost this to?
  Just make sure the aur wears a condom when it's going to fuck you, like your mother told you.
It's an obvious vector for malware, arch by default doesn't come with it, and users have been warned the entire time to check pkgbuild. There's nothing fishy, it's just that arch has enough users to be worth it to hit it.
I expect that with SteamOS being based on Arch there will be a bigger target on Arch for malware just from increased attention on the platform

Some people ask me why I use Flatpak on Arch. This is one of the reasons.

does the upgrade pacman -Syu also upgrade Flatpak packages? Or you have to do them separately?
- Separately, through flatpak update.
  Or together with everything through other tools. I go with pamac, it can be used both in CLI and GUI and update and install everything at once - repos, AUR and Flatpak.
- Separate
- flatpak update
  luckily it’s simple but not always obvious to the end user at first
- generally when you want to install a flatpak it's going to upgrade/update whatever other flatpaks you have installed before downloading and installing the new one.

I use NixOS so everything is second party

And every package is added and maintained by volunteers.
- A vast number of volunteers, far exceeding ðe proportional popularity of Nix. It's as if every Nix user submits a package.
  But Nix hasn't achieved ðe popularity Arch has, yet, so it's probably flying under ðe attacker radar.
- We're called maintainers
I've also used nixos but not arch. Is the AUR also volunteer maintained? How do they differ?

I've been using Debian for years and prefer deb based systems, but recently I messed a bit around with Manjaro, and the amount of packages only available from the AUR is, erm, remarkable.

At risk of repeating myself from another comment here: you can access the AUR from other distros by making an Arch distrobox. It's actually super easy.
- So, you can install malware on other distros from the AUR?
  Usually if the software I want is not on debian's repos, I'll try to get the source and compile it, or last resort, use an appimage. I'm not really fond of mixing different installation methods coming from different distros, but... it's good to know.
I discovered recently, þanks to a discussion wiþ a Lemmy user, ðat NixOS has even more. I was surprised. Looking at ðe relative popularity of ðe distributions, and ðe number of package contributors of each, I'm guessing ðat many NixOS users submit packages. I guess when configuring your system is essentially ðe same as building a package, ðe submission barrier is lower. Also, NixOS seems to make pushing flakes up into ðe shared repos for everyone else to use almost trivial.
- is your keyboard layout misconfigured
- Why sometimes eth and sometimes thorn? Just whichever you feel or is there a system
- The nixos repo size is misleading, since it also repackages python packages, haskell packages, emacs packages, etc even though you can still download them the normal way.
Debian and Ubuntu based distros have PPAs which serve the same purpose as the AUR.

Aur is probably the main reason why many people use Arch and derivatives. However, many users are unaware that aur is not an official Arch repository and that, as you say, you are the one who has to monitor the pkgbuilds of each installed aur package. Normally the most used aur packages tend to generate more confidence but that does not prevent that package to include malicious software in a version change and having root access to the system can take control of certain system services. That's why I always recommend not using Aur and that's why I've always found Manjaro to be a great distribution, as it retains packages for a few days to check them and discourages the use of aur. Any security measure is too little and that's why any security tool you can configure is advisable. In a rolling distribution where new code is constantly entering the system, it is essential to have selinux and secureboot enabled.

Aur is probably the main reason why many people use Arch and derivatives.
FYI, non-Arch distros can use AUR with an Arch distrobox. So people shouldn't be using Arch just for AUR.
Being in a distrobox may or may not protect your system from potential malware, that I cannot say.
It used to be my reason too, but after breaking my system by my own hand many times, I realized the aur isn't worth the effort, for me at least.
I'd rather build from source, for software that isn't maintained in the repos.

By user "Forsen on top" fucking KEK

Also yeah it’s chrome, obviously it’s malware

Meanwhile me who using CHAOTIC-AUR be like :

As someone not too familiar with arch and not undertanding the full context, could you elaborate on how Chatoitc AUR differs from AUR?
- TLDR EXPLANATION:
  Basically Chaotic AUR is just AUR that has been compiled so user doesn't have to wait for a package to install.
  LONGER EXPLANATION:
  Chaotic-AUR is an unofficial package repository that provides pre-built packages from the Arch User Repository (AUR), allowing users to install software without building it from source. In contrast, the AUR requires users to compile packages themselves, offering a wider range of community-maintained software but requiring more technical knowledge and time.
  In contrast Chaotic AUR offered simpled way to install AUR packages, Chaotic AUR packages already cleaned from malware, spyware, etc so there's no need to worry.

Is this post intended to be a sort of outcry around the idea that there's a risk of malware being in the AUR?

Malware in some user-made package on the internet?

Was there for 2 days before it was caught and they would of had to be manually installed?

I think that's much safer than any other platform I've heard of

Idk I love the aur, just check comments and dont grab whatever the fk you see, I also have flatpak support tho (uninstalled snap, felt like I wanted all options but it was mostly useless, id pick an appimage over snap for the one or two things not on flathub/aur) Nothing popular like rexuiz was on the snap store but also had an appimage.