1. It’s extraordinarily complex.

The reality is that security is not just technical implementation, but also actually getting people to use the solutions. “Stop disabling SELinux” is not a real answer to when people disable it, like we have one person in this thread.

Another problem with complex security solutions is they are hard to get right. Even if you enable them and configure them, without being an expert, it’s possible you left a gap here or there, and holes and gaps in these solutions.*

2. Like so many other complex linux security solutions, it is lacking effectiveness due to still sharing the same kernel.

There is a good, but bit dated writeup here about the problems with Linux security, from an architecturual perspective: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html . But, the short version is that the Linux kernel is large and complex, and has a lot of attack surface. And it’s a frequent source of vulnerabilities because attackers can hit it as long as they access to the kernel, even if they are in a container/sandbox. Like, copyfail and dirtyfrag would punch through containers, but also punch through SELinux.

For example, just earlier on lemmy someone dropped a zero day that punches through SELinux: https://programming.dev/post/51103657

Now, SELinux can be used to restrict what a root shell could do after escalating… but that’s further complexity you have to learn to configure, and configure it correctly as well.

Ultimately, none of the Linux security solutions come anywhere near the isolation of simply running something in a virtual machine. Which, also happens to be a lot simpler and actually possible to get people to use.

*(putting this at the bottom because it veers off topic) I have a greater argument and problem with mentalities like this. I have noticed a pattern, where many of the more effortfull and toil intensive security solutions are recommended by people who have the time, energy, and skills to execute them. They have a bias/blindspot to the realities, which is that not everyone is in the same situation as them.

For example, updating/patching software. Linux distros like RHEL or Debian, have a policy where they only do security updates, and don’t do feature updates or bugfixes. This enables them to ship automatic updates, so that security issues are automatically handled.

On the other hand software like Windows, likes to bundle in breaking changes along with security updates. So automatic updates get disabled because “They might break something”. And then, people don’t update them, and environments get horrifically out of date, because not enough money/time/people is put into regular IT people who are in charge of maintaining them.

But some environments, have heroes, people who go around patching everything and keeping everything up to date and secure. And when they see these environments that don’t have everything patched, they usually give the advice of “You should patch everything” (while simultaneously advising against auto updates), not understanding that these environments are lacking a key ingredient: Themselves.

Sure, I could be a hero. I could “patch” everything manually. I could deploy SELinux. But that would only last until I get burnt out, or leave. Once I’m gone, SELinux, the patches, any similar security solutions are gone. I’ve met so many people, even in cybersecurity, that are apathetic about security, even though they might have cared once upon a time.

Thank you so much!

Sorry for no transcript :(

I use KDE as my desktop. KDE is installable on any distro, although you probably want a distro with a newer version of it like Fedora or Opensuse. On KDE, these two shortcuts do what you would expect them to do.

Win + V opens up a clipboard manager by default:

I actually like this clipboard manager better than the Windows default clipboard manager, because it lets me search, edit, or star items so they can be found quickly from the “starred only tab”. The amount of items kept is also configurable, and it keeps way more items than the Windows clipboard manager.

Windows + Shift + S opens Spectacle (KDE’s screenshot utility) by default. It has some basic editing features, but one feature about it I like is there is an option to upload the screenshot directly to imgur for easy sharing.

For RDP, I recommend using Remmina to connect to machines via RDP. It supports shared clipboard, but also shared filesystem and some other nice stuff. You can save connections and their options to easily connect again later.

Remmina is a mature program that is available in the repositories of most Linux distros.

Yes. Nix is fine as long as you do “supported” things. But the moment you step outside of that, it’s a nightmare and you have to be or consult an expert.

The lack of gpu acceleration is a dealbraker for making nix a flatpak alternative. And you can get it working but then it breaks the desktop integration unless you do more work and yeah.

Were these numbers generated using compsize or a similar tool that asseses deduplication, symlinks, and compression properly?

I get much different numbers than I use one or the other.

gdu:

gdu ~ Use arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help
 --- /var/lib/flatpak ---
    2.6 GiB ████████  ▏/runtime
  471.7 MiB █▍        ▏/app
  114.4 MiB ▎         ▏/repo
    9.1 MiB           ▏/appstream
  164.0 KiB           ▏/exports
        0 B           ▏.changed

compsize:

[moonpie@nefertem flatpak]$ sudo compsize -x /var/lib/flatpak
Processed 73225 files, 31115 regular extents (70649 refs), 35977 inline.
Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL       64%      1.9G         2.9G         6.4G
none       100%      1.3G         1.3G         2.6G
zstd        35%      596M         1.6G         3.8G

Only 2 gb’s are actually being used, even though some tools might be reporting 6.4 gb.

And this is with these runtimes installed:

Name                                               Application ID                                     Version                               Branch                  Installation
Freedesktop Platform                               org.freedesktop.Platform                           freedesktop-sdk-23.08.34              23.08                   system
Mesa                                               org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                25.0.7                                23.08                   system
Mesa (Extra)                                       org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                25.0.7                                23.08-extra             system
Mesa                                               org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                26.0.5                                25.08                   system
Mesa (Extra)                                       org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                26.0.5                                25.08-extra             system
Codecs Extra Extension                             org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra                                                    25.08-extra             system
GNOME Application Platform version 49              org.gnome.Platform                                                                       49                      system
Breeze GTK theme                                   org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze                           6.6.5                                 3.22                    system

So you can get app which weights 4mb with runtime which weight 250 more than app itself.

Except for the fact that the runtime is reused across apps, meaning that another app which uses up that runtime won’t be taking up any extra space.

Appimages weight much less but lack sandboxing.

You can sandbox them with something like firejail or bubblewrap.

I hadn’t tried nix but it also lacks sandboxing.

Similar, you can sandbox with bubblewrap. But you gotta write nix code to do it because ofc:

https://github.com/fgaz/nix-bubblewrap , https://github.com/nixpak/nixpak , https://sr.ht/~alexdavid/jail.nix/

I’ve tried to use them before though, definitely not as easy as flatpak’s flatseal sandboxing in comparison. Also, nix apps on non nix distros aren’t GPU accelerated.

I use nix to get many cli apps (on arch/cachyos), but the flakes and non flakes split makes things very tough, and causes this annoying documentation split. And then certain things can only be done via flakes and vice versa.

I try to limit my use of nix to using home manager to ONLY install packages, but even then there are annoying things.

Like for example, many users may gravitate towards nix-env for installing packages, not understanding that oops, you aren’t actually supposed to use nix-env. nix profile install is better and more supported, but it’s flakes only. Flakes are off by default, and must explicitly be enabled because they are still “experimental” despite them being extremely popular. The official documentation is often hesitant to touch flakes because of this, so there is this horrific documentation split where a bunch of different unofficial docs cover flakes in varying manners.

Or, another thing is that nix apps on non nix distros have no gpu access/hardware acceleration. I have a home manager config to enable that: https://github.com/moonpiedumplings/home-manager/blob/main/home.nix#L32

And then I couldn’t figure out how to make that work on aarch64 (asahi) so I just had to disable it,

But it is something that is insane to make someone learn how to do for just installing programs. But the latter issue doesn’t affect nixos.

Anyway, I like nix. I use home manager, but for packages only, and I use it for my development environments.

Maybe. But they, and many others overestimate the amount of size flatpaks take up.

Flatpaks use a “runtime”, a shared set of libraries and programs flatpak apps use. With one flatpak app, there is just one runtime. But with 2, 3, 10 flatpak apps, there are still only going to be 1 (to 3) runtimes on the system. This is not the same for something like appimage.

In the blog, they compare the size of deepin calculator across formats. But this is not a fair comparison. A more fair comparison would involve comparing the app size without the runtime, or comparing many apps installed.

In addition to this, if you are on btrfs, further deduplication and compression is done. This (and symlinks) won’t show up in many disk and space usage analysis tools. To get a more accurate measure, use compsize instead of traditional tools. It will show you how much transparent compression (when btrfs compresses files but you can stilll access them normally), symlimks and the like are saving space.

Anyway, I am interested in more cross distro package managers though. Flatpak, docker, and nix cover a lot of things but have their annoying edge cases and paper cuts, especially in comparison to snap in some ways for some apps.

Edit: linglong appears to reuse system libraries, which would probably lead to significanr space savings at the cost of portability across distros

I hope we get something that’s not distro specific. Docker/podman work for a lot of stuff, but some apps/services aren’t available via them, and I really would like an alternative to snaps, which often can ship those apps.

Also, these and the fedora one mentioned in the other comment appear to target immutable distros. Snaps work on any distro.

Cuz there are more than just browser caches I would like to nuke.

Cuz bleachbit is more granular, seperating out site data and cookies, enabling me to delete the 1gb alpine docker image downloaded by https://github.com/MercuryWorkshop/anuraOS without logging me out of anything that is using cookies. Firefox doesn’t appear to have that option.

Edit: cuz I use multiple browser profiles, and this can delete cache from all of them at once instead of me having to do it once per profile 2-3 times.

Show is better than tell:

Often, when viewing images, firefox “caches” the image in order to be able to load it faster when visiting that site again. Left unchecked, this cache (of images and other assets) can pretty much infinitely grow. Many other apps also have big caches.

Bleachbit actually is useful. Instead of hunting through your system and accidentally rm -rfing the wrong folder and losing all your precious firefox profile data, it enables you to quickly nuke all caches, freeing up a significant amount of space. I would probably free up 15gb+ if I ran it based on these images.

EDIT: just ran it. I freed up 6gb of space. Not 15gb. Huh. Still, pretty good though, and if you are space starved (I used to use a machine with only 32 gb of storage TOTAL), then it’s useful to keep things slim.

In my testing, zram has much, much better compression than zswap.

The points about LRU inversion, cgroups, and so on are valid, but at the end of the day, I don’t really care. I was able to open as many firefox tabs as I wanted with zram, but I could not do so with zswap, and that’s what matters to me.

The author of a blogpost is a facebook engineer. Millions of ultra high performance Linux servers are a very different usecase than a single desktop. It’s perfectly reasonable for a solution for one to not be appropriate for the other.

Copied from my previous comment about this where ISO also gave a similar reply and was met with a similar response lmao.

while the production build runs entirely client-side without a backend server. I

This eliminates many, many potential security issues and is an excellent design choice.

In production, movie data is queried using an in-browser SQLite database via WebAssembly, e

https://documentation.divio.com/

https://jamesg.blog/book.pdf

Documentation about documentation, hehehe

Api tokens are also a stolen credential. They are getting stolen via things like unsandboxed malicious packages that search for them.

That is TeamPCP’s main modus operandi, they have an infostealer that tries to nab whatever credentials it can find, and then uses those to spread more.

dbt fusion

Seems to use the Elastic License: https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-fusion/blob/main/LICENSES.md

Which is simply not open source in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Licensing_changes

Elasticsearch and Kibana would be relicensed from Apache License 2.0 to a dual license under the Server Side Public License and the Elastic License, neither of which is recognised as an open-source license.[

(although elasticsearch later changed back to the AGPL. As did Redis, and Mongo which also tried similar moves lmao).

It looks like there are a mere 4 Apache 2 (open source license) programs inside, but the other 40+ programs are behind that ELv2 license, so the program can’t really be called open core even (term when some of the program is open source but some features are paid only and not open source).

So no, DBT fusion is not FOSS. DBT Fusion is source available, which is the term used to refer to when you can read the source code but there are legal restrictions on what you can do with it.

it sucks that there seem to be no real non dead movement shooters. I am currently keeping an eye on:

• Quake live: has an active NA pickup games community
• Krunker.io : Mostly dead but many of the more dedicated players are still online, plus they host tournaments. Open source native Linux client.
• Warsow

And there were probably others. But so few.

Moderation, much as the average internet user loves to lambast it, is not an easy task at all.

This is exactly why you should use reddit lemmy as a forum instead of discord. One of the repeated problems I have seen in the emulation on android community, is that there are many entittled children, who harass and troll in these communities. Moderators have to ban them, but the bans are per server. That means that each server has to deal with the same troll who kicks up a fuss, and then ban them. And then they create a new account and repeat. I have seen communities and projects die due to harassment and trolling and it makes me sad.

But on reddit Lemmy, instance bans could be applied to ban problematic users from many communities at once, saving and deduplicating work.

Moderation is a lot of work, but moderating a reddit Lemmy community is ultimately a team sport, rather than an individual one.

some of us really care about ethics outside the scope of just what happens with the source.

And some don’t. There are a ton of corporate open source projects that use slack as their main communication channel. You can try to convince them. But here you’re just kind of preaching to the choir tbh.

What do you think the “F” in “FOSS” is all about?

Read the article I linked. It discusses problems with the term “FOSS”.

Though, you should also take a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar . Not every project actually wants to receive contributions from the public. Sometimes they only want to just dump the code on the net for people to review or fork.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html

There is a term to refer to projects like these: Open source. Open source, means to allow for collaborative development. User control of their systems, and/or privacy are not concerns when it comes to open source projects.