The question should by why you’d want to.
Because the application working is more important than the downsides in my case. Its quite useful for an application which hasn’t been updated in a long time, will never receive updates again, or doesn’t work in my nonstandard environment.
I have had older applications fail to function due to DLL hell.
You can modify the keybinds in software too. You would need to change your console keymap (TTY) and your desktop environment keybindings. Programmable keyboard is most likely easier though.
I played around with it and changed both to just use F1 = tty1 and so on, without requiring CTRL+ALT.
Your needs must be different than mine.
I press one button combination and have root without ever entering a password. I press a similar combination and go back. Not sure how this is a pain in the ass.
All I do is have agetty --autologin root tty2 linux run as a service. It launches on startup, and I just hit CTRL + ALT + F2 if I ever need a root shell.
All its doing is just auto logging-in as root on TTY2.
From what I’ve read, no. Though it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of a root process handling untrusted input from a regular user.
The TTY method is IMO better as it ties privileges to a piece of physical hardware, bypassing the complexities of userspace elevation of privileges.
The nosuid mount option disables this behavior per mount. Just be sure you don’t use suid binaries.
Example: sudo or doas. I replaced those with switching to a tty with an already open root account on startup. Generally faster and (for me) more secure (you need physical access to get to the tty).
From my experience a user account usually needs to be in the “wheel” group to elevate privileges through sudo. So try that.
Simply: Do the protections against someone taking your computer and installing a malicious program before/as your OS, or a program that has attained root on your machine and installs itself before/as your OS, matter enough to you to justify the increased risk of being locked out of your machine and the effort to set it up and understand it.
If you don’t understand and don’t want to put in the effort to, then my advice would be to leave it off. Its simple, and the likelihood it saves you is probably very miniscule.
… Alpine is designed to be friendly to corporations who want to lock down their devices and prevent you from modifying them.
“Designed to” assumes intent. Alpine is absolutely designed to be Small, Simple, and Secure. Using busybox instead of the GNU coreutils is a means to this end. Using musl instead of glibc is a means to this end.
On the about page they list why they use these tools. The licensing is not listed at all.
A threat model in which you don’t trust the Linux Foundation and volunteers but do trust Microsoft.
Its all about what you want to protect. If a security breach is worse for you on Linux than it is on Windows because of which party has the data, then for you, Windows might be more secure.
Some people get confused because they think there is some objective measurable security rating one can apply to a system for every person. There isn’t. We may use the same systems but have different threat models and thus rate the security different.
Privilege escalations always have to be granted by an upper-privilege process to a lower-privilege process.
There is one general way this happens.
Ex: root opens up a line of communication between it and a user, the user sends input to root, root mishandles it, it causes undesired behavior within the root process and can lead to bad things happening.
All privilege escalation is two different privilege levels having some form of interaction. Crossing the security boundary. If you wish to limit this, you need to find the parts of the system that cross that boundary, like sudo[1], and remove those from your system.
[1]: sudo is an SUID binary. That means, when you run it, it runs as root. This is a problem, because you as a process have some influence on code that executes within the program (code running as root).
secureblue is about as secure as Linux can get…
Unless you have an unusual threat model, this statement is utter nonsense. I can run a kconfig stripped kernel with zero kernel modules and one userspace process that is completely audited and trusted, without the ability to spawn even other processes or talk to network (because the kernel lacks support for the IP stack).
Secureblue might offer something significant when compared to other popular and easily usable tools, but if you compare it to the theoretical limit of Linux security, its not even comparable.
I examined Secureblue’s kernel parameters and turned multiple of them off because some were mitigations for something that was unnecessary. IE: The kernel would make the analysis that your hardware is not affected by a vulnerability, and thus there is no need to enable a specific mitigation. But they would override this and force the mitigation, so you take a performance hit, for what I understand to be, no security gain. Not sure why they did that, a mistake? Or did they simply not trust the kernel’s analysis for some reason? Who knows.
Is desktop linux more insecure than Windows?
This is an impossible question to answer without more information. Depends on your threat model, how you use the computer, your distro, etc.
If they don’t have the training data available, then I wouldn’t consider them open source.
…if someone nefarious gets to the point they can read this stuff then they’ll already be able to record your screen, log keystrokes, etc.
No screenshots -> less data. Less data -> lower breach severity.
(Unless you have an unusual threat model)
All this can be gutted by an advanced user.
The difference would be that RMS is extremely well-versed in computer technology. He understands the problems with non-free software.
Someone with his knowledge could choose to disregard those issues for convenience, but Stallman is willing to make great sacrifices.
…the government is absolutely a threat to you.
I don’t see how this supports your previous claim of: “If you don’t have privacy from the government, you don’t have privacy.”
If you don’t have privacy from the government, you don’t have privacy.
Privacy refers to more than just privacy regarding the government.
Your threat model and situation might mean that if the government knows something, its as bad as if every single person knows it.
But this isn’t for everyone.
I’m fairly sure the complexity of flatpak/appimage solutions are far more than the static linking of a binary (at least on non-glibc systems). Its often a single flag (Ex:
-static) that builds the DLLs into the binary, not a whole container and namespace.