A theme is software and software has bugs. While this one had a pretty dramatic effect, you take basically the same risk with every program you run. This, along with hardware and user errors are why backups are so important; they change a disaster to an inconvenience.
I honestly did not know that KDE themes contained executable code. When I think “theme”, I think of cosmetic settings that plug into an existing program, which I would hope sanitizes its input and does NOT execute arbitrary code. I don’t think “arbitrary executable code running as root”.
I’m assuming KDE warns you about this when you try to install a theme, right? I’m not at my KDE system to test at the moment. I did try downloading a theme tar from the web site, and it doesn’t seem to contain any code — just SVG files, a colors config file, and a metadata file.
A windows device just wiped the hardware settings of a periphery device, because it got an update and the new lighting settings wanted to control the LEDs in that device. All gone
A theme is software and software has bugs. While this one had a pretty dramatic effect, you take basically the same risk with every program you run. This, along with hardware and user errors are why backups are so important; they change a disaster to an inconvenience.
/ Preach mode off
I honestly did not know that KDE themes contained executable code. When I think “theme”, I think of cosmetic settings that plug into an existing program, which I would hope sanitizes its input and does NOT execute arbitrary code. I don’t think “arbitrary executable code running as root”.
I’m assuming KDE warns you about this when you try to install a theme, right? I’m not at my KDE system to test at the moment. I did try downloading a theme tar from the web site, and it doesn’t seem to contain any code — just SVG files, a colors config file, and a metadata file.
Breeze, for example, contains a lot of code. For instance
A windows device just wiped the hardware settings of a periphery device, because it got an update and the new lighting settings wanted to control the LEDs in that device. All gone