So I installed both Vivaldi browser and Flashpeak Slimjet on my Manjaro box.

All of a sudden there's this thing called "Cryptoseed" on my computer. Can't find out anything about it, except that when I go to uninstall it, I'm told it's required by both Slimjet and Vivaldi.

All are now uninstalled - don't like surprises.

Does anyone know what this is about?

I was just getting interested in how fast Slimjet is, It would be a shame to have to avoid it.

https://github.com/anderson-arlen/cryptoseed

I could be wrong, so I wouldn't bet real money on it, but my guess is you could probably forcefully uninstall it and have both browsers function just fine. I am not familiar with Manjaro; did you install the browsers from the OS packages repositories, assuming it uses them? If so, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

To me,

sounds like this 'surprise software' is a dependency, which is common. Distros that automatically resolve dependencies are going to install that needed software when installing the main package. I can't think of another reason it would say that it's required by another package.

I couldn't find a dependency list for either program, and I'm not sure why this particular one is necessary. It's basically either trust that your distro is installing what is needed (which is typically not a problem if using official repositories) or move to Slackware and manage all the dependencies manually.

It seems to have something to do with having a bitcoin wallet.

OP is using Manjaro?

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/vivaldi/
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/slimjet/

https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?t...ivaldi_Browser
https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?t...ser_Repository

https://anderson-arlen.github.io/cryptoseed/

I was unable to get either Slimjet or Vivaldi to install from the repositories - multiple error messages about broken files.

So I used debtap on the deb files, which worked fine. I did that with another machine, too, but that time, a month ago, this "Cryptoseed" didn't appear; and this time uninstalling it also removes the browsers.

I've contacted both browsers but no response yet.

I have no need of any bitcoin stuff, and I must say I'm kind of annoyed at these people installing stuff without asking. What else might this app get up to?

I checked the Arch wiki; there is no entry for cryptoseed.

It is a long stretch for me to consider that something bitcoin related is in any way a legitimate dependency of a browser (or just about anything else for that matter).

Just my two cents.

While post #3 has the obvious answer, cryptoseed is not in archlinux' repositories, nor in the AUR either, and indeed it "is a long stretch for me to consider that something bitcoin related is in any way a legitimate dependency of a browser".
I wonder if Manjaro differs significantly from Arch here.

binkyd, could you provide more information about this package, and about the vivaldi/slimjet packages?

After using debtap to build from the .deb file, this appeared in the "Transaction Summary" box:

This seems to say that cryptoseed IS in the community repo,, and that the debtap program is what's doing this.

Don't know where to go with this now.

cryptoseed definitely isn't in ArchLinux' [community], must be a Manjaro thing.
I don't rightly see how debtap (A script to convert .deb packages to Arch Linux packages) comes into it, surely a package created by it would show up as [local], not [community]...?
Btw, cryptoseed also isn't in Debian or Ubuntu repositories - as far as I can see.
Like I said, it seems your hunch that something doesn't smell right was correct.

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