I use KDE. Some use GNOME. Most other options are probably to be left out as X11 is unsafe.

Cosmic is not nearly finished, but will probably be a bit safer, as its in rust, even though not tested.

Then there are window managers like Sway, Hyprland, waymonad, wayfire, etc.

RaspberryPi also has their own Wayland Desktop.

Is every Wayland Desktop / WM equally safe, what are other variables here like language, features, control over permissions, etc?

  • Ramin Honary
    24•1 year ago

    This is not a very good question. If you are concerned about security you need to think about what specifically you are trying to keep safe? Here are some examples of different security scenarios:

    1. Do you want your computer to be safe when it is stolen?
    2. Do you want to run lots of native apps from untrusted sources?
    3. Do you want it to be used by many people and you don’t want them to be able to steal each others secrets?

    Each one of those questions has different means of securing the computer. With question 1, it is not so much a matter of desktop environment, rather it has more to do with using full-disk encryption, setting a boot password in UEFI, and always having your lock screen enabled.

    With question 2, this is a much more difficult task and you would probably be better off running apps in a VM, or carefully crafting your “Security Enhanced” Linux profile – or not using Linux at all, but using FreeBSD which allows you to run apps in jails.

    With question 3, be more careful with filesystem permissions and access control lists, setup your sudoers file properly, and use a desktop environment with better security auditing like Gnome or KDE Plasma.

    • @[email protected]OP
      2•1 year ago

      Never heard of these jails, like bubblejail? Its available on Linux too.

      I know the question is vague and highly dependend on Threat model etc. Pre-enabled services, distribution adding stuff to it, SELinux confined user (not working with Plasma at all), xwayland support for keylogging chosen keys (Plasma).

      Also GTK is widely used for rust apps, this doesnt exist on Plasma at all, not a problem though as Plasma is not Gnome and simply supports GTK normally.

      • @[email protected]
        3•1 year ago

        I don’t think the DE itself matters, but I can recommend using an immutable OS (makes it harder to install malware) and installing flatpak apps only. You can also use software like flatseal to further lock down permissions

                • @[email protected]OP
                  1•1 year ago

                  No that is bluefin, their special distro.

                  Ublue is like rpmfusion but for image-based. Its the addition to fedora, with packages they can’t ship. They replace all the libav* with complete ffmpeg which is pretty great as its a great tool and Firefox works ootb.

                  For example they have -nvidia images for every image, which is the best way to use the proprietary NVIDIA drivers as you can roll back and a broken update simply wont ship to you.

                  They also have modded kernel images for Razer, Surface and a special Framework image.

                  Another cool project basing off their “starting point” toolkit to create custom images, is secureblue, a security-optimized Version including

                  • hardened kernel and hardened_malloc
                  • updated Chromium, maybe soon Brave
                  • soon a hardened Chromium (currently as COPR “vanadium”) like GrapheneOS
                  • hardened services, firewall
                  • removed unused kernel modules

                  It is very security focused though, so no Firefox, no Flatpak as its currently broken, Podman (distrobox, toolbox) is currently not working and its unclear if that is actually necessary, …

                  Bluefin is their fancy distro with lots of Tools, a custom Desktop, integrated Developer packages and more.

        • lemmyvoreEnglish
          0•1 year ago

          I’m starting to think people misunderstand what an “immutable” distro really does…

          • @[email protected]
            2•1 year ago

            Please do share with me what I do not understand.

            A mostly read only filesystem built from a limited number of packages, with other files being in a fixed number of locations mean it is harder for malware to hide.

            • lemmyvoreEnglish
              0•1 year ago

              You can achieve the exact same thing with a normal distro if you mount /var and /boot separately of /. And if you get a root exploit it’s just as harmful on either approach.

              “Immutable” systems are meant for maintainer comfort not for user security.

              • @[email protected]
                1•1 year ago

                No, you can’t : in an immutable distro I can reasonably trace almost any file in the filesystem back to the package that created it, and know with a reasonable degree of certainty that the installed version of said file has not been tampered with. That isn’t possible an a normal distro.

                • lemmyvoreEnglish
                  0•1 year ago

                  Sure it is, has been for decades. You can use a read-only root partition, there are many tools to ensure the integrity of everything on it, and tracing files back to their package is a very old feature.