For a programmer?
I bet 99.9% people won't consider opening a .docx or .pdf 'unsafe.' Actually, an average white-collar workers will find .md much more suspicious because they don't know what it is while they work with .docx files every day.
I wish you were wrong.
Never understood why that became so common place ...
It's all whether or not you trust the entity supplying the installer, be it your package manager or a third party.
At least with shell scripts, you have the opportunity to read it first if you want to.
Of course, many installers ask for administrator access anyway...
As you said, most installers need to place binaries in privileged locations anyway.
Maybe the good side-effect of LLM's will be to standardize better hygiene and put a nail in the coffin of using full-fat kitchen sink OS images for everything.
It's been over a decade since this became a norm...
And 10 years since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17636032
The link sadly seems to be dead though
I think the truly average white collar worker more or less blindly clicks anything and everything if they think it will make their work/life easier...
*.dmg files on macOS are even worse! For years I thought they'd "damage" my system...
Well, would you argue that the office apps you installed from them didn't cause you damage, physically or emotionally?
The instruction may be in a .txt file, which is usually deemed safe and inert by construction.
why is pdf unsafe?
What format is safe then?