Tobias Hunger

Not only that: It protects your data. The Unix security model is unfortunately stuck in the 1970s: It protects users from each other. That is a wonderful property, but in todays world you also need to protect the users from the applications they are running: Anything running as your user has access to all your data. And on most computer systems the interesting data is the one the users out there: Cryptogrqphic keys, login information, financial information, … . Typically users are much more upset to loose their data than about some virus infecting the OS files, those are trivial to fix.

Running anything as anlther user stops that application from having access to most of your data.

The same happens with any of the new immutable distributions. It’s just less effort as you do not need to do the nix configuration dance anymore.

Any of the many immutable distros (vanilla os, fedora silverblue, bluefin, aeon, endless os, pure os, …) will all obviously work.

Most of your customizations will live in your home directory anyway, so the details of the host OS do not matter too much. As long as it comes with the UI you like, you will be mostly fine. And yku said you like gnome, that installs many apps from flathub anyway and they work just fine from there.

For development work you just set up a distrobox/toolbox container and are ready to go with everything you need. I much prefer that over working on the “real system” as I can have different environments for different projects and do not have to polute my system with all kinds of dependencies that are useless to the functionality of my system.

NixOS is ofmcourse also an option and is quasi-immutable, but it is also much more complicated to manage.

Rustfmt is not very configurable. That is a wonderful thing: People don’t waste time on discussing different formatting options and every bit of rust code looks pretty identical.

Why would they need to share ssh keys? Ssh will happily accept dozens of allowed keys.

When I last checked (and that is a long time ago!) it ran everywhere, but did only sandbox the application on ubuntu – while the website claimed cross distribution and secure.

That burned all the trust I had into snaps, I have not looked at them again. Flatpaks work great for me, there is no need to switch to a wannabe walled garden which may or may not work as advertised.

Why don’t you download the latest release/nightly from github and unpack it somewhere?

Yeap, -O3 is mostly voodoo. Berger has some measurements.

Spoiler: He found your username has a bigger effect on performance than most compiler flags:-)

Ansible must examine the state of a system, detect that it is not in the desired state and then modify the current state to get it to the desired state. That is inheritently more complex than building a immutable system that is in the desired state by construction and can not get out of the desired state.

It’s fine as ,one as you use other people’s rules for ansible and just configure those, but it gets tricky fast when you start to write your own. Reliably discovering the state of a running system is surprisingly tricky.

That interface is let any random app take screenshots of anything running on the same server without any way for the user to know it happens.

I am so glad that interface is gone, especially when running proprietary apps.

Plugins are a code execution vulnerability by design;-) Especially with binary plugins you can call/access/inspect everything the program itself can. All UI toolkits make heavy use of plugins, so you can not avoid those with almost all UI applications.

There are non-UI applications with similar problems though.

Running anything with network access as root is an extra risk that effects UI and non-UI applications in the same way.

Usig anything as root is a security risk.

Using any UI application as root is a bigger risk. That’s because every UI toolkit loads plugins and what not from all over the place and runs the code from those plugins (e.g. plugins installed system wide and into random places some environment variables point to). Binary plugins get executed in the context of the application running and can do change every aspect of your program. I wrote a small image plugin to debug an issue once that looked at all widgets in the UI and wrote all the contents of all text fields (even those obfuscated to show only dots in the UI) to disk whenever some image was loads. Plugins in JS or other non-native code are more limited, but UI toolkits tend to have binary plugins.

So if somebody manages to set the some env vars and gets root to run some UI application with those set (e.g. using sudo), then that attacker hit the jackpot. In fact some toolkits will not even bring up any UI when run as root to avoid this.

Running any networked UI application as root is the biggest risk. Those process untrusted data by definition with who knows what set of plugins loaded.

Ideally you run the UI as a normal user and then use sudo to run individual commands as root.

It is the same as with all logins: It goes through the Pluggable Authentication Modules. So you need a service that uses PAM (they basically all do for a long time now) and the configuration of that service needs to include homed as an option to authenticate users. Check /etc/pam.d for the config files.

I use toolbox: Distrobox is a pretty horrible shell script and deleted parts of my home directory when I tried that.

In the end I just pointed toolbox to a script named podman that just adjusts the setup to what I need, implementing the missing features I wanted that way.

Censorship is about you being limited in the actions you can take to express yourself. It is not about cushioning you from the consequences of those actions from the people around you.

You obviously were allowed to take action: The contents was apparent upon on a forum and here as well. People reacted to your actions: Admins removed your contents and blocked you and I am telling you that your understanding of wayland as well as politics is limited.

Deal with it.

Small communities have a hard time staying up to date. X11 was ported decades ago, when non Linux OSes had more mind share and commercial backing. I doubt anyone could port X11 if that was the new thing mainly developed on Linux today.

Yes, wayland by design does not let random applications grab events intended for other applications nor does it let random applications take screenshots at any point in time showing other applications screens. This requires applications to do screen sharing differently, and it indeed breaks random applications sending events to random other applications. That is basically all you wail about and an absolutely necessary property of any sensible system and it is very embarrassing that it took so long to get this.

Removing dump stuff to keep a community relevant, on topic and with a good signal to noise ratio is not censorship. Claiming so is just dumb.

One more reason to run the steam flatpak: At least I can sandbox away things steam does not need to concern itself with.

The point of using the TPM is that it does not unlock the drive unless it has a certain set of software is loaded in a certain sequence on the machine with that specific TPM chip.

So if somebody breaks grub and makes it load a shell, then that results in different software loaded (or at least loaded in a different sequence) and will prevent the TPM to unlock the system. The same is true if somebody boots from a rescue disk (different software loaded) or when you try to unlock the disk in an unexpected phase of the boot process (same software but different sequence of things loaded, e.g. after boot up to send the key to some server on thr network. The key is locked to one TPM, so removing the drive and booting it in a different machine also does not work.

The TPM-locked disk is pretty secure, even more so than that USB idea of yours – if the system you boot into is secure. It basically stops any attacker from bringing extra tools to help them in their attack. All they have available is what your system has installed. Do not use auto-login or run some root shell in some console somewhere…