Are these malware ?

Per se? No, maybe with the exception of GNOME Shell which literally runs code from the Internet unsandboxed. Can the traffic they silently generate be used for malicious purposes? Absolutely.

▲

WD-42 4 days ago | parent [-]

Wasn’t it KDE that had malware in its theme store not too long ago? Let that sink in for a bit. You changed around some icon themes and it executed arbitrary code.

And let’s not pretend that kde wouldn’t have an extension system if it could - but it’ll never have one because implanting one in that c++ spaghetti nightmare will never happen.

	▲	m132 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think you meant to reply to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702680 But if not, I'm not criticizing GNOME in isolation here. It's just what I use and what I'm most familiar with. KDE has the same issues and it does have an extension system too. It's called KNewStuff.