jamesbunagna

joined 2 weeks ago
 

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated to the project.

Aside from the fact that it's relatively new and unknown, does this hold a candle to other Firefox-based projects? They seem to be competent by their own comparison tables.

Has anyone got any first-hand experience?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 hours ago

Yeah, it seems that they even acknowledge that Tor and Mullvad are better for extreme threat models.

"The only browsers that can provide sophisticated fingerprinting protection against advanced scripts are Tor Browser & Mullvad Browser.

If you have an extreme threat model (Ex. Political dissident, journalist, or if you are in some other kind of high risk situation), please use one of those browsers."

I suppose we'd have to commend them for being fair.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

Unfortunately, I've yet to experience Qubes OS myself. So I can't help you with that. Wish ya the best of luck though!

 

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated to the project.

Aside from the fact that it's relatively new and unknown, does this hold a candle to other Firefox-based projects? They seem to be competent by their own comparison tables.

Has anyone got any first-hand experience?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

I hope at least the earlier problems with distrobox have been solved.

Is your intention to go in the direction of Qubes OS with extra steps?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago (5 children)

Yo OP, did it work out in the end?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

Thanks a ton for the elaborate answer!

I’ve moved to cachy OS mainly because I needed to get certain things working that were only packaged in appimage

Hmm..., I'm aware that the AppImage situation is pretty dire since it requires FUSE 2 libs while everyone and their grandmothers have moved to FUSE 3; software that's been almost out for a decade now. Thankfully, I've never actually experienced trouble getting it to work on any distro. Sure, installing some libs was often required, but nothing too fancy.

BUT I believe I could have worked it out in Aeon by fiddling around with distrobox

FWIW, I'm 100% positive that you could get it to work on Aeon. IIRC, I've also used AppImages through distrobox containers.

I think once there is a mature wayland-based Openbox replacement

Interesting. If it isn't too much of a trouble, could you pitch Openbox :P for me? I'm not too familiar with it, but you did get me curious.

(eyes on labwc)

Put into my backlog of stuff I've got to checkout.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I was hoping that this reply wasn't needed 😅. In all fairness, some of the replies found on ycombinator definitely offer legitimate criticism. However, secureblue's dev team didn't just ignore all of that as they can be found discussing on the very same thread. Since then, they've actually implemented changes addressing these concerns. For example:

Trading off possible kernel bugs against letting a whole LOT of userspace software run with real root privilege. And flatpak is a lot of attack surface no matter how you run it, and the packages have a bad security reputation.

This was raised as a good objection to some of its design choices. This eventually lead secureblue's dev team to maintain twice as many images for the sake of offering images in which this was handled differently. And it didn't stop there, it has continued to output a lot of work addressing concerns both found on that thread and outside of it. Consider looking into its commit history. Heck, even some of the GrapheneOS-people have provided feedback on the project.

Of course, no one dares to claim it comes close to Qubes OS' security model. Nor is this within scope of the project. However, apart from that, I fail to name anything that's better. Kicksecure is cool, but they've deprecated Hardened Malloc; a security feature found on GrapheneOS and that has been heavily inspired by OpenBSD's malloc design. By contrast, secureblue hasn't abandoned it. Heck, it elevated its use by allowing it to be used with Flatpak; something that hasn't been done on any other distro yet. This is just one example in which the secureblue dev team and its various contributors have shown to be very competent when it comes to implementing changes that improve security beyond trivial checkboxes.

Peeps may name other hardening projects. But fact of the matter is that I'm unaware of another hardened Linux project that's quite as feature-rich:

  • Tails; cool project that does wonderful work against protecting one against forensics. But that's literally it. It's not even meant as a daily driver.
  • Whonix; developed somewhat together with Kicksecure, so this one actually has put in substantial work into hardening. But, again, not meant to be used as a daily driver.
  • Nix-mineral; cool project, but it's still alpha software by its own admission.
  • Spectrum OS; great idea, but it's not even out yet.

Please feel free to inform me if I've forgotten anything. So, basically, if you want a hardened daily driver for general computing, then one simply has to choose between Kicksecure and secureblue. I wish for both projects to flourish, but I've stuck with the latter for now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Do you run Steam inside gamescope as well ?

Nope I don't. But that's because running Steam isn't really a thing for me to begin with. I don't own my games through Steam aside from a couple that are only accessible through it. Whenever I need to play those, I access those through another system; be it another distro or (God forbid) M$. For the games I've played on secureblue, none of them were owned through Steam. Hence, running Steam inside gamescope has not been something I had to do yet. Unsure, if it even works as supposed.

Does your setup support casks ?

I actually don't know. It probably doesn't, though. EDIT: Found the following within Bluefin's documentation: "Note that the cask functionality in homebrew is MacOS specific and non functional in Bluefin, flatpak is used instead."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

That was a great read. Wonderfully detailed. Thank you!

It's a pity that it went down like that. Would you say that a properly matured openSUSE Kalpa would be your perfect setup? Out of curiosity, have you used projects related to Fedora Atomic for long periods of time? If so, how would you compare them?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I'm glad to find that the general perception on CachyOS has definitely changed for the better. I believe it was two or three years ago when I stumbled upon CachyOS for the very first time. I don't think it did anything noticeably different back then compared to now. But as it was still relatively new, people didn't quite jump on the bandwagon. As such, I actually received quite a bit of condemnation whenever I tried to recommend the distro to others. I'm glad to see that it's currently flourishing. Congratz to the CachyOS team for sticking to their guns. Whenever a product is good, it will eventually receive recognition.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I put it on my partners computer after Aeon crapped itself and put the system in a boot loop until I switched the hard disk out.

It is only release candidate software. As such, I didn't have high expectations. However what you've described here is pretty troublesome. And I'd imagine your partner didn't do crazy stuff that would justify such a reaction by the OS.

I'm personally very interested in the future of openSUSE Aeon. So far, I've mostly seen positive reactions. Therefore, a negative experience as such really piques my interest. If possible, could you elaborate upon what had transpired before the system broke? Or perhaps your partners personal experience with the distro in hindsight.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Try invoking ujust distrobox-assemble first. This command is also found on the FAQ page. Enter the container created through this method.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

FYI, the userns images have been (or are about to be) deprecated.

 

Hey folks! After using Fedora Atomic for quite a while and really appreciating its approach, I've been eyeing one particular feature from NixOS: its congruent system management. Inspired from Graham Christensen's "Erase your darlings" post, I'd like to explore implementing something similar to NixOS' impermanence module on Fedora Atomic as one step towards better state management.

Why not just switch to NixOS? Well, while NixOS's package management and declarative approach are incredible, I specifically value Fedora's stringent package vetting and security practices. The nixpkgs repository, despite its impressive scope, operates more like a user repository in terms of security standards.

I've already made some progress with the following:

  • Fedora Atomic's shift to bootable OCI containers has helped with base system reproducibility when one creates their own images. This process has thankfully been streamlined by templates offered by either uBlue or BlueBuild
  • Using chezmoi for dotfiles (would've loved home-manager if it played nicer with SELinux)

My current (most likely naive and perhaps even wrong) approach involves tmpfs mounts and bind mounts to /persist, along with systemd-tmpfiles. I'm well aware this won't give me the declarative goodness of NixOS, nor will it make the system truly stateless - there's surely plenty of state I'm missing - but I'm hoping it might be another step in the right direction.

Particularly interested in:

  • Best practices for managing persistent vs temporary state
  • Working with rpm-ostree's (or bootc') assumptions
  • Tools or scripts that might help
  • Alternative approaches that achieve similar goals

Thanks in advance!

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