cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/12400033 (Thank you https://lemmy.ml/u/Kory !)
I first used Linux about 5 years ago (Ubuntu). Since then, I have tried quite a few distros:
Kali Linux (Use as a secondary)
Linux Mint (Used for a while)
Arch Linux (Could not install)
Tails (Use this often)
Qubes OS (Tried it twice, not ready yet)
Fedora (Current main)
For me, it has been incredibly difficult to find a properly privacy oriented Linux distro that also has ease of use. I really enjoy the GNOME desktop environment, and I am most familiar with Debian. My issue with Fedora is the lack of proper sandboxing, and it seems as though Qubes is the only one that really takes care in sandboxing apps.
Apologies if this is the wrong community for this question, I would be happy to move this post somewhere else. I've been anonymously viewing this community after the Rexodus, but this is my first time actually creating a post. Thank you!
UPDATE:
Thank you all so much for your feedback! The top recommended distro by far was SecureBlue, an atomic distro, so I will be trying that one. If that doesn't work, I may try other atomic distros such as Fedora Atomic or Fedora Silverblue (I may have made an error in my understanding of those two, please correct my if I did!). EndeavourOS was also highly recommended, so if I'm not a fan of atomic distros I will be using that. To @[email protected], your suggestion for Linux Mint Debian Edition with GNOME sounds like a dream, so I may use it as a secondary for my laptop. Thank you all again for your help and support, and I hope this helps someone else too!
Does Librewolf (RPM) work?
I only know that Chromium browsers use userns or setuid namespaces to isolate tabs. This is not allowed by the flatpak seccomp filter (applied for all apps) which is why bubblejail is a thing. But bubblejail is veeeeery alpha, portals, theming, running random binaries etc all broken or difficult.
Flatpak Chromium browsers use zypak instead, which will have a weaker seccomp filter than the tab sandbox in Chromium (because flatpak apps do more than browser tabs and there is only a single filter for them all).
No idea about firefox, they just support the flatpak without any mention if the sandboxing is better, worse, unaffected etc.
Librewolf builds firefox themselves, if they just add
allow-replace-mallocor how its called in their mozconfig it works with hardened_malloc. And I think that is the easiest solution. If they dont add that it should probably not launch. Flatpak works for some reason, probably because somehow it doesnt use hardened_malloc.Tbh I want to compile firefox and the kernel with -O4 as I have a x86_64-v4 CPU. They will not do that as people run old hardware.
Thunderbird is the same, btw everything is built on the same codebase. My dream would be to build Firefox, Thunderbird and Torbrowser on COPR (or Github so the Fedora people dont kill me) with hardened configs.
Longer than on vanilla fedora, or longer than before on secureblue? They distrust the hardware and generate random values as far as I understood, also use kernel lockdown mode. Those are important and increase boot times but not performance. Btw also if your CPU is affected by spectre/meltdown attacks it will automatically disable hyperthreading. Very cool karg that should totally be the default.
Yeah secureblue is nice and very needed. Wanted to do something similar (as did a lot of other people) and found qoijjjs awesome ground work. He invests hours in that project, look at the "secureblue Chromium vs Vanadium" table its crazy.
Have not tested it. I rely on the flatpak.
Isn't bubblejail mostly a frontend to bubblewrap? Therefore, is it perhaps possible that, if well-understood, reliance on bubblewrap instead should translate to a less buggy (but indeed harder) experience?
I've often heard that the flatpak Chromium browsers are (somehow) less secure, but never heard why that's the case. Thank you for offering a very concise explanation on the matter!
WOW, that would be awesome! You've already found yourself a 'client'/'customer' :P . And I'm sure that a lot of others would be interested as well.
Yes. To be clear, it's both longer than on vanilla Fedora Atomic and also longer than before on secureblue.
Reminds me of this project, I wanted to wait until it stabilized..., but it never got that far 😅. But I hope its maintainer will join team secureblue, if they haven't yet*.
For reference; WOW, we definitely can't deny their commitment. I feel indebted. Perhaps I should support them 😅. Do you happen to know if there are any other channels besides Github to support them (and the project)?
Bubblejail allows to create different seccomp filters per app. This means you can allow the browsers to create namespaces, which fixes that problem. There are tons of problems though.
Yup needed some time to understand that zypak thing too. I think it boils down to that issue, they will be okay but less secure than possible, so... why not use something else?
Yeah there are a ton of hardening arguments. Currently I cant build that damn stuff anymore because somehow I have missing build deps that I have installed and added to my path 100%.
In this repo I collect my mozconfig, and if everything goes well I will use github builder to make RPMs. That would be lit, because I would have all of them hardened, but for v3 and v4 optimized. Put in a directory, do some rpm repo magic and I have my own repo.
Feel free to help me figure that stuff out. Librewolf has a nice build pipeline, I created a PR to just support replacing the malloc, that would be the easiest and best solution.
Then fedora firefox and librewolf would allow that, only flathub firefox missing really. Replacing the malloc is a very unsupported case for flatpak though, as the apps should be OS-unspecific.
Other commitments are too much right now. But thanks for the offer!
Feels like you fell asleep while you were writing this and didn't bother to finish it later on hahaha (or simply forgot).
Yes something like that, edited it