Note that neither dpkg -i nor rpm -i with a downloaded .deb or .rpm is any better than curl | sh. Installing .deb or .rpm packages is more than just unpacking a

Note that neither dpkg -i nor rpm -i with a downloaded .deb or .rpm is any better than curl | sh. Installing .deb or .rpm packages is more than just unpacking an archive, it's effectively giving root to the package author: both .deb and .rpm files can have embedded scripts that are run at install time. This is probably true for all Linux distro package formats (I hope there are exceptions, but I'm not putting too much faith in that).