Yeah, it seems like they genuinely are just trying to be compliant with the law. I do think the “anyone who has concerns about this is a Russian troll” thing is obnoxious though, knowing of the existence of sanctions doesn’t mean we’re all lawyers who know the requirements here for open source projects.
Wayland has security benefits over X11 so choosing one with a Wayland session is a good idea but other than that I’m not really aware of any breakdowns of security between DEs. My gut says the major options are pretty similar on that front, most hardening guides only mention DEs to tell you which ones support Wayland. The choices you can make to harden your system are changing things at a lower level that is entirely unrelated to your DE. That said I’m just a privacy/security interested layperson and security is a topic where you can always split more hairs if you want (or need) to.
What you’re asking for is distributions to roll their own solutions instead of contributing upstream to make it better for everyone. Distributions and the organizations behind them frequently do things to make the user experience better, it’s just that the preferred way to do this is by making the projects they use better…which will just look like a DE version bump by the time it makes it to a distro changelog.
Don’t they typically do minor anti-burn in changes during idle, basically having a built-in screensaver? Still, an additional one could be nice for peace of mind.
Idk, there’s probably some of that but until today with the clarification that the bans are happening from a list of employers they’re required not to work with, things were pretty unclear and I don’t think it was unreasonable to assume they were going beyond what was required…especially with Linus’ response being pretty tone deaf given the information critics had. People were angry what seemed like random Russian citizens were being targeted and Linus responded angrily as if we all already knew their employers were on a list despite it not being reported yet.
It’s not a huge deal but Linus is just not very good at handling this kind of thing. Nerds should have assumed there was more behind the scenes and given the benefit of the doubt, though.