On point 1) yes so they would have to compile, that is not a huge barrier and it would also result in improved quality of modules just as CI/CD does. On 2) eve

On point 1) yes so they would have to compile, that is not a huge barrier and it would also result in improved quality of modules just as CI/CD does. On 2) even if you ignore the much larger attack surface due to running ALL installs as the root user, consider the one-shot opportunities by disabling the protections of capabilities(7) # capsh --print -- -c 'pip list > /dev/null' Current: = cap_chown,cap_dac_override,cap_dac_read_search,cap_fowner,cap_fsetid,cap_kill,cap_setgid,cap_setuid,cap_setpcap,cap_linux_immutable,cap_net_bind_service,cap_net_broadcast,cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw,cap_ipc_lock,cap_ipc_owner,cap_sys_module,cap_sys_rawio,cap_sys_chroot,cap_sys_ptrace,cap_sys_pacct,cap_sys_admin,cap_sys_boot,cap_sys_nice,cap_sys_resource,cap_sys_time,cap_sys_tty_config,cap_mknod,cap_lease,cap_audit_write,cap_audit_control,cap_setfcap,cap_mac_override,cap_mac_admin,cap_syslog,cap_wake_alarm,cap_block_suspend,cap_audit_read+ep And if --user was the norm, it would be trivial to write an apparmor/selinux policy to protect files like ~/.*shrc or ~/.profile It is just the basic principle of least privilege. Heck if irssi can bother with an apparmor profile, the maintainers of pip or the package should be able to.