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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] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Security is preemptive. Keylogging is not a hypothetical, it just hasn't happened to you. Neither is it random, desktop linux is differentiated from linux server by its GUI. It is much harder to make linux desktop secure. I see threat as one of many in a long list of the weaknesses present in desktop linux.

I am not trying to say you shouldn't have the choice to use X11, my original comment was about how Linux Mint doesn't offer the choice of a DE that supports Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Similarly, a flower pot falling on your head is not a hypothetical, it just hasn't happened to you.

But does it mean you should wear a helmet every time you go outside?

To begin with, the probability of keylogging being used in an attack against you is abysmal. Not because it can't be done, but because it's a complicated, inefficient attack, and if the attacker can run code on your machine there are much better ones.

Secondly, keylogging is still possible on Wayland, if the malicious code can attach to the relevant processes. Such as a vulnerability in your browser, which also happens to be a place where you type passwords and CC numbers a lot.

Third, as Wayland evolves it will have to develop better IPC features. You can't have a functional desktop with zero communication. And we'll be back to square one.

Fourth, desktop communication is not even that sensitive. 99% of it is stuff like "window id 0x09123 was maximized".

Last but not least, if keylogging were a real issue, don't you think it would have been addressed in the 40 years that X11 and Xorg have been around? It's fascinating how some people think that Wayland was the first to discover this previously completely unknown threat that threatens to doom us all.