The problem is that as you get deeper into Linux, you become progressively more and more likely to install your own packages from source, and then all of that curation goes out the window.

I'm not 100% convinced that the number of volunteers for package managers like Arch are actually sufficient to catch malware even in its current form; I think they get a lot of benefit out of desktop Linux being a relatively low-value target. But I'm really not convinced that their approach would be scalable if they actually had to scale at the level of npm. From what I can tell, Arch only has in the neighborhood of 13,000 packages[0], and it doesn't easily allow installing arbitrary versions[1]. I have nothing but praise for Linux, but none of the main distros have anything close to the amount of developer activity that the npm ecosystem has.

And that's when curation breaks down: Arch solves the problem of not having a ton of packages in the main repos by allowing multiple upstreams, by supplying AUR, and by compiling packages from source. But once you drop down into AUR, it's a lot more dangerous and would be a lot easier for people to push malicious code. And if you're pulling Makefiles off of Github, all of that goes out the window -- and there are good Linux software packages that encourage that behavior.

Not to mention the number of Linux software packages that straight up just give you a shell script to run that configures and installs the rest of the program (looking at you, Calibre). If you're lucky and you're using Arch, then you might be able to just install Calibre from the main repo. But that's also kind of Arch-specific, on Debian systems it's much more likely that you jump out of the main repos because they're out of date and you want the most recent version; you either start pulling from a dev-controlled upstream or you start running the shell scripts to install that software.

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Don't get me wrong, I actually think that from a curation perspective, the way Linux package managers work is the best available solution we have for human moderation for software. A single large curated list that fits everyone's needs is impossible, it does not scale[2]. The only scalable solution for curation is to have a lot of separate curated lists that people can subscribe to; and then to recursively have curated lists of lists.

However, curation is not a magical catch-all solution against malware, particularly when you get AUR and source compilation in the mix. Curated lists are one layer of security, and need to be combined with other sandboxing techniques, with user education, and with (when possible) minimizing the number of packages people need to install. It's not as simple as saying, "the volunteers won't let anything bad happen" -- and I definitely wouldn't say that Linux package security is a solved issue, I think a recognition of some of the weaknesses of that model is part of the reason we're seeing so much effort going into Flatpak[3].

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[0]: https://archlinux.org/packages/

[1]: Yes, you can roll back but it's not really something that's advised to do for specific packages. Generally, your system will run smoother if you keep everything up-to-date and don't pin specific versions.

[2]: We've seen this with both iOS and Android, you either make a limited list that doesn't meet everyone's needs, or you have bad curation. Sometimes both. Splitting up lists does a lot to help solve that problem.

[3]: Although in the spirit of having multiple curated lists, I wish we'd start to see more popular upstreams than just Flathub.