You are essentially asking what is safer than running arbitrary code from the internet sight unseen directly into your shell and I guess my answer would be any other standard installation method!

The OS usually has guardrails and logging and audits for what is installed but this bypasses it all.

When you look at this from an attackers perspective, it’s heaven.

My mom recently got fooled by a scammer that convinced her to install remote access software. This curl pattern is the exact same vector, and it’s nuts to see it become commonplace

Use your distro's package manager and repos first and foremost. Flatpak is also a viable alternative to distribution, and if enabled, comes along with some level of sandboxing at least.

"Back in the day" we cloned the source code and compiled ourself instead of distributing binaries & install scripts.

But yeah, the problem around curl | bash isn't the delivery method itself, it's the unsafe user behavior that generally comes along with it. It's the *nix equivalent of downloading an untrusted .exe from the net and running it, and there's no technical solution for educating users to be safe.

Safer behavior IMO would be to continue to encourage the use of immutable distros (Fedora silverbue and others). RO /, user apps (mostly) sandboxed, and if you do need to run anything untrusted, it happens inside a distrobox container.

Literally anything else.

Keep in mind that its possible to detect when someone is doing curl | bash and only send the malicious code when curl is being piped, to make it very hard to detect.

Software should run in a sandbox. Look at Android for example.

I think a lot of this comes down to assumptions about the audience and something along the lines of "it's not a problem until it is". It's one aspect I wonder about with migrants from windows, and all the assumptions or habits they bring with them. Microsoft has been trying to put various safety rails around users for the past 20 years since they started taking security more seriously with xp, and that gets pushback every time they try and restrict or warn.

> Why do you still need sudo permissions to install anything on most Linux systems?

You don't with Flatpak or rootless containers, that's partially why they're being pushed so much.

They don't rely on setuid for it either

Because you're making system-wide changes which affect more than just your user?

There are and there has been distros that install per user, but at some level something needs to manage the hardware and interfaces to it.

I’m not a novice user anymore either, but I care about my security and privacy.

When I see a package from a repo, I have some level of trust. Same with a single binary from GitHub.

When I see a curl|bash I open it up and look at it. Who knows what the heck is doing. It does not save me any time and in fact is a huge waste of time to wade through random shell scripts which follow a dozen different conventions because shell is ugly.

Yes you could argue an OS package runs scripts too that are even harder to audit but those are versioned and signed and repos have maintainers and all kinds of things that some random http GET will never support.

You don’t care? Cool. Doesn’t mean it’s good or safe or even convenient for me.

> Why do you still need sudo permissions to install anything on most Linux systems

Not guix :)

One of the coolest things about it.