With the recent AUR supply-chain attack that compromised over 400 (and possibly up to 1,500) packages, I’m seriously considering switching distros. Attackers took over orphaned packages and modified PKGBUILDs to pull in malicious npm dependencies like atomic-lockfile, which deployed credential-stealing malware and even eBPF rootkits. The fact that the trusted packages themselves didn’t look malicious makes this especially concerning.
Like many Arch users, I’ll admit I don’t carefully read every PKGBUILD before installing from the AUR. The official recommendation has always been to review them manually, but realistically, who does that for every package? This incident made me realize I’ve been relying on trust rather than vigilance.
I’ve been on Manjaro for years specifically because of the AUR’s vastness, but this attack directly undermines that selling point for me. I ran the Distrochooser to see what else is out there, and it strongly recommended openSUSE as my top match: https://distrochooser.de/en/d5b4e0067841/
For those who’ve made the jump from Arch/Manjaro to openSUSE Tumbleweed (or Leap): How was the transition? How does the OBS compare to the AUR in terms of package availability for niche software?
You can mitigate the aur issue and retain everything else offered by not using aur. You will have the most arch like system compared to all other distros, without the risk of aur. Those packages in aur are mostly not included in other distros, so you won’t lose anything.
Personally, I left arch nearly a year ago due to it being too popular making it a target for malicious activity, it only offered bloated and over weight systemd, and after running arch for nearly 20 years, I just got bored and wanted something new, so I moved to void Linux. Very happy with my choice. Boot time is 3 seconds, shutdown is 5 seconds. runit is a nice light and simple init system. It’s rolling release but not bleeding edge, so updates never break anything.