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It’s amazing that people criticize Windows security with .exe’s and then install packages from external repositories with the security of “trust in the repository”.

As with almost every case of these sorts of comparisons, these are likely separate groups of people holding separate groups of opinions.

I don’t use Arch anymore, but when I did I found that the AUR was really useful to quickly install niche applications that would take ages to be approved on to an official repository. Often those would be made by the application developers themselves or members of the community. I would personally vet the packaging script myself, but I’m sure many wouldn’t - and that’s fine. As with most software, there’s some trust involved and often you assume that if you’re installing from a reputable repository it’s going to be fine. If people aren’t vetting the installation scripts and are installing from random repositories, that’s really their problem. I’m glad the possibility existed and it’s the one thing I’ve missed in distros I’ve used since then.

I also feel like it “breaking all the time” was part of the stereotype itself. I stopped using Arch because it was stable for almost 3 years and part of the point of using it in the first place was learning Linux by fixing stuff that broke - except that stuff never broke so I grew bored of it.

This isn’t anything new. There’s a whole lot of people on the Fediverse who throw the word Fascist around willy nilly but who will happily make use of Fascist rethoric in regards to those who they see as political enemies.

They seem to think that the bad thing about Fascism isn’t the authoritarianism, political violence, censorship, etc, but the fact it’s a “right wing” government behind those - those would all be perfectly justifiable means to an end in the name of a left wing movement.

I see this happening more in american politics than over here, and I think it’s in part a lack of knowledge of history, but also never having had an actual fascist regime in the country’s recent history. My parents were tortured by the political police. I have a bunch of family who lived under an actual Fascist regime, and colleagues from other countries with a recent history similar to mine, and I notice that people in general, even in the far left, are way more careful about how they use the word Fascist. American internet “leftists” - which I put in quotes because many don’t seem to actually hold any left wing views - love LARPing about living under fascism and that somehow excusing every thing they claim Fascism is bad for - against their political enemies.