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Comment by fao_ | Hacker News Reader

"reading a script" is actually a worse user experience on Linux than just using repositories or flatpak, though. It's pretty rude of software developers to put the onus on users to verify that they're not doing something outright malicious in terms of the installer.

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Are you not concerned with the software developers doing something outright malicious in the software itself?

Most repositories have some sort of vetting process as far as I'm aware. In the case of Zed, because it's open-source, it can be examined more completely, although I don't think it's expected for every update to be heavily scrutinized.

In the end, at some point you either have to inspect every line of code yourself or trust others to have done it for you. Package managers fall into the latter category.

Instead of pasting it in terminal, I opened a new tab and read it. There’s maybe 200 lines, most of which aren’t relevant to my platform. Didn’t see anything unusual.

I then proceeded to install tens of thousands of lines of code I didn’t read onto my machine.

My point? People really seem to be bike shedding this install script bit. If I was a malicious actor I wouldn’t be hiding the bad parts in the install script.

200 lines versus the actual install steps which is 1. wget the tarball, 2. extract the tarball to .local/bin, 3. done, or a few more steps to add the desktop file.

so you feel offended by this

That's an incredibly weird response to a comment primarily concerned with the user experience of vendoring software on Linux. Not only does it not engage with my comment but it also virtue signals quite a bit, don't you think?

It is incredibly ironic when looking at your post history that you state that you have "been involved on[sic] [...] the nuances of interface and user experience". Does my comment not meet that very criteria?

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