Less is safer: How Obsidian reduces the risk of supply chain attacks

This is one way to look at it, but ignores the fact that most users use third party community plugins.

Obsidian has a truly terrible security model for plugins. As I realized while building my own, Obsidian plugins have full, unrestricted access to all files in the vault.

Obsidian could've instead opted to be more 'batteries-included', at the cost of more development effort, but instead leaves this to the community, which in turn increases the attack surface significantly.

Or it could have a browser extension like manifest that declares all permissions used by the plugin, where attempting to access a permission that's not granted gets blocked.

Both of these approaches would've led to more real security to end users than "we have few third party dependencies".

Funny enough, I thought this earlier about Arch Linux and it's deritives. It was mentioned on reddit that they operate on a small budget. A maintainer replied that they have very low overhead, and the first thought that popped into my mind was that most of the software I use and rely on comes from the AUR, which relies on the user to manage their own security.

If engineers can't even manage their own security, why are we expecting users to do so?

I think this criticism is unfair because most common packages are covered by the core and extra repos which are maintained by Arch Linux. AUR is a collection of user build scripts and using it has a certain skill cliff such that I expect most users to have explicit knowledge of the security dangers. I understand your concern but it would be weird and out of scope for Arch to maintain or moderate AUR when what Arch is providing here amounts to little more than hosting. Instead Arch rightly gives the users tools to moderate it themselves through the votes and comments features. Also the most popular AUR packages are maintained by well known maintainers.

The derivatives are obviously completely separate from Arch and thus are not the responsibility of Arch maintainers.

Disagree. AUR isn’t any trickier than using pacman most of the time. Install a package manager like Yay or Paru and you basically use it the same way as the default package manager.

It’s still the same problem, relying on the community and trusted popular plugin developers to maintain their own security effectively.

I understood GP's point to be that because Obsidian leaves a lot of functionality to plugins, most people are going to use unverified third party plugins. On arch however most packages are in core or extra so for most people they wont need to go to AUR. They are more likely to install the flatpak or get the appimage for apps not in the repos as thats much easier.

yay or paru (or other aur helpers afaik) are not in the repos. To install them one needs to know about how to use AUR in the first place. If you are technically enough to do that, you should know about the security risks since almost all tutorials for AUR come with the security warnings. Its also inconvenient enough that most people wont bother.

In obsidian plugins can seem central to the experience so users might not think much of installing them, in Arch AUR is very much a non essential component. At least thats how I understand it.