The entire philosophy of Arch is to put user in control. The PKGBUILD format is plain-text and reviewable. The documented best practice has always been to read the PKGBUILD and the .install files before building.
I'm not saying they shouldn't look into measures to make it less prone to such attacks, but "take it down" is a very stupid take. If people can't deal with the existence of AUR, there's plenty of different distros to choose already.
Considering the average time for game development nowadays, these studios barely had time under the Microsoft umbrella. It's just ridiculous they're getting shut down already.
Nope. Distrobox does not offer any meaningful protection, since its purpose is to integrate with the system. It's basically meant to make downloading and managing packages from different distros, on the same system, much easier... but it's not meant to protect and isolate your device the same way that Flatpak or other type of containers do. That baing said, stop relying on Distrobox as a safety measure, and check your recently installed and updated packages since 9th June, to make sure you were not infected.
I was starting to get too confident in AUR. Thankfully I wasn't affected. Just replaced all possible AUR packages to their respective Arch and Flatpak alternatives, with exception of very few or from the ones I had no option. But will definitely check before updating them, and will only install AUR packages as a last resort.
No. If it came from AUR, it doesnt matter the method you used. You should check all the AUR apps you recently updated (from 9th to 12th June), and compare it to the lists. Only AUR though... Arch official repos are not affected by it.
Microsoft is trying to "reinvent" Xbox every couple years, for the last 15 years. Not even themselves trust their own plans, since they never stick to it.
Proton Mail is operated by Proton AG, which is a for-profit corporation.
That being said, even though Proton Mail is probably more trustworthy than Google and Microsoft services, it's still handled by a for-profit corporation and therefore can't be fully trusted.
Nowadays if something is owned by a corp I wouldn't recommend anyone to get too attached to it. Use it while you feel it's worth, but prepare to swap for something else eventually.
In other words: don't ever fully trust your data to company owned software, and always look for a backup solution.
Not much, really. I've heard Zen had memory leak issues on Windows, but I was using it on CachyOS and didn't bother to swap. But I use Waterfox on Android and on Windows, and I like it very much.
If I had to choose just one nowadays though, I would probably stick with Waterfox. I like Zen, but sometimes it feels more experimental.
The only Microsoft service I was using was Game Pass. For me, it was never cheap... the price was fair for what they offered. But after they doubled it I cancelled immediately and never looked back. And I would not, even if they decided to drop the price back again to what it was. Because now I know it is unreliable, and they will raise the price again as soon as they feel comfortable.
Typical of MS though, so that didn't surprise me at all. They just can't keep a reliable and fair priced service for long. As soon as they believe they can fuck people up, they do.
But thankfully nowadays we have so many options, to whatever product Microsoft offers, that's actually not as hard to get free of them as they might think.
Mozilla Firefox has gone downhill...
Not sure if they're the best options nowadays (balancing privacy and usability), but I've been enjoying Waterfox and Zen for a while and don't see any reason to go back to Firefox.
Mostly avoid downloading and running packages from sources you don't trust. And if you're going to run something you don't fully trust, try to run it sandboxed (like firejail or a vm, for example). Linux is generally safer than Windows because a lot of malware are created to exploit Windows weakness... also, if you use Flatpak (sepecially verified ones) or your distro package manager, you will hardly get infected.
If you rotate your IP, cleaned your session cookies, and don't start again spamming anything, I believe it's highly unlikely you will get automatically flagged again.
But honestly... As others have said, why even bother? Or worst... Why would you worry about it? If you create an account and get banned again while behaving normally, just take it as a lesson that Reddit sucks and move on.