Rainmeter 100% safe to install?

[fonpaolo]

I don't know if this could convince you or not, however I give you some tips:
1- download Rainmeter application only from http://www.rainmeter.net/
2- when you want to download and install a skin, be sure it's packaged as rmskin, not zip, arj, rar, or worse of all exe.

Doing things this way you will never have any problem.

[NukingNerdz]

Rainmeter is very intimate with your hardware, as one of the primary things it does is monitor your hardware. It has lots of capabilities that might be suspicious in the context of another program, like getting keyboard input (InputText plugin) or copying things to the clipboard (!GetClip bang) and who knows what else.

Really, all I can tell you is that it is 100% safe as long as you get it from us, and you will just have to decide what you want to do.

Alright, that's a lot info Probably going to install Rainmeter today or I'm upgrading to another OS to make it look even more nicer, tbh I don't really like win10 but for example your desktop looks super awesome on it!

[NukingNerdz]

I don't know if this could convince you or not, however I give you some tips:
1- download Rainmeter application only from http://www.rainmeter.net/
2- when you want to download and install a skin, be sure it's packaged as rmskin, not zip, arj, rar, or worse of all exe.

Doing things this way you will never have any problem.

Thanks a lot for the skin info! I didn't know that though I'm very, very careful with anything I run, pretty much everytime before I run anything, I scan it at virustotal/hybrid-analysis

[fonpaolo]

You're welcome NukingNerdz.

The rmskin package was introduced to prevent any kind of manumission at the contained files and also it doesn't allow to add other kind of software (mostly malware) after it's been created.
Even if it's a sort of compressed folder, it's not really "only" this, when you install a skin, Rainmeter is able to verify if it's safe, if yes, installs the content, if not, refuses to proceed.

[dgrace]

I would add the caveat that there's no guarantee that 3rd-party plugins don't harbor dangerous code, and it's possible to package a plugin in a .rmskin download. So you still need to be careful what skins you install, AFAIK the Rainmeter team doesn't vet every uploaded skin to see if it's got malicious DLL's.

But as far as the main Rainmeter codebase, you can look through the code yourself and see:

https://github.com/rainmeter/rainmeter

dave