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Need distro advice (beehaw.org)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello, gorgeous community!

My friend, a generally non-technical person is looking for a good gaming distro. He has been daily driving Windows and OS X before, his main motivation for switching Linux is to streamline his contributions to a game development project we have, that is largely Linux-based (we use Nix for dev environments and build automation).

The only Linux distro I've ever used for gaming is SteamOS, and all my other experience is in the Nix/Arch domain, so I am not sure what to recommend to my friend.

As I mentioned, the only hard requirement we have is a possibility to sustainably use Nix package manager with experimental functions (command, flakes), - and I am willing to help my friend setting it all up. But I also would like him to be able to use the OS for gaming whilst experiencing only the expected and acceptable amounts of pain.

So far we have Nobara and Chimera on our radar. Is there something you can recommend? Any advice in general would be helpful, thanks in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Do you sandbox each and every process? Do you whitelist everything each process can do? Every file it can access, every which way it can use the network, every bit of CPU and RAM and hardware resource it can use?

If you don't do that, why do you want to impose upon me a complete block of inter-window communication, which I use for desktop automation, and which has basically zero security impact in the wild?

I don't mind Wayland having security features, but why are they so heavy-handed and non-optional? Things like firewalls, AppArmor, cgroups, they're all customizable. Why is Wayland all or nothing?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The reason I mentioned keyloggers is because it allows an attacker to perform privilege escalation by recording your sudo/root password and automating an attack. I searched it up and I do see automation tools for Wayland, maybe they aren't as developed as those for X11. For you, your usecase makes sense, though i (personally) wouldnt take that risk. The majority of users do not use such tools and should probably use Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

keyloggers is because it allows an attacker to perform privilege escalation by recording your sudo/root password and automating an attack

So does putting a script called sudo in your PATH.

Keylogging is one of the lamest, most inefficient methods of attack. If you can run code on someone's machine there are so many other things you can do.

The fact Wayland has wasted so much time and complicated things so much focusing on a non-issue is mind-blowing.

The majority of users do not use such tools and should probably use Wayland.

Don't worry, this is not the only thing holding back Wayland adoption.