this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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I didnt know these existed!

What is this? These are images based on ublues "starting-point" toolkit to create modified variants of Fedora Atomic (the name for all atomic, immutable etc distros).

This means everyone can create the Distro they prefer, with programs, settings, services, udev rules, wallpapers, hardening etc. exactly as they want, while keeping just these diverging from upstream.

Have a look at this, Linux Mint ;D

So these images use GrapheneOS'ses hardened kernel, maintained by anthraxx and the hardened memory allocator maintained by the Divested Computing Team and GrapheneOS

So the result is a project with somewhat of a difficult (but currently working) 3rd party dependency, but the result is very close to upstream and a drop-in replacement.

Just like with ublue, all you need to do is rebasing to the unsigned image, rebooting and rebasing to the signed image. The guide is in the repos!

Its important to test it, and help the developers maintain the components!

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Maybe it's because it has hardened in the title it was automatically marked

[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago

Harden my Kernel, daddy

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Haha no buggy app actually

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Some people’s fetish maybe?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Very interesting indeed! And thank you for raising awareness!

There's another similar project that's still WIP and that hasn't received a lot of development recently. Though, its maintainer does provide hardening scripts for Fedora's Atomic distros that are worth looking into. Hopefully, we might even expect a collaboration of sorts between these projects early next year 🤞.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Yes! Its not that hard as the changes are not big.

That specific distro I linked is veeeery opinionated, installing Chromium, removing Flatpak and even software stores. So how am I gonna install software now, layering? Its a bit of a joke on "security" I dont get with all that namespace stuff. I guess this just doesnt work with Flatpaka and to my knowledge flatpaks are more secure than RPMs

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Maybe it's an attempt at the chromium OS way of life?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

True! You could use Webapps for many things.

I have to say I dont like google but I very much like a streamlined and efficient OS like Android or ChromeOS.

Even having a webview is so important... wtf is electron, why??

But you just lack so many features. Like people saying they are okay with no doubleclick or even right click, thats so bad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I also like the security aspects, but Chromium OS limits me too much. I can see Android getting to a point I can use it, given the apps.
I would appreciate if there was a better way to create Android apps though. Something libre, stable and included in major distro repos would be nice. I think Debian has made some advancements in regards to that?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

installing Chromium

This wouldn't sit well with most privacy conscious folk out there. Though, I can understand it from a security point of view. Especially, when one notices that Chromium isn't installed from Fedora's repos, but instead the RPM is built to offer a more up-to-date version that should provide improved security compared to the stable version.

removing Flatpak

Probs for the sake of disabling unprivileged user namespaces; as you might have correctly alluded to.

even software stores

I imagine for the sake of minimizing attack surface.

So how am I gonna install software now, layering?

The Nix package manager is installable on Fedora's atomic distros, so perhaps that route is worth exploring.

to my knowledge flatpaks are more secure than RPMs

To my knowledge, Flatpak's sandbox indeed isn't achievable by default with RPMs; unless one knows how to properly utilize SELinux to that effect.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Not sure about SELinux and unofficial Chromium though.

Yes pretty much thats the state.

Sandboxing... people argue always about that, Firefox RPM, Firefox Flatpak from Flathub or from Fedora (which is incomplete lol), or Chromium.

I am no expert but started using Firefox RPM again as its the fastest.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Good find! I want to test this out this weekend :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Warning, very opinionated. But app compatibility is interesting, you need to allow custom namespaces and add flatpak and podman again, lol.

Its way of harding doesnt make sense if you have modern Linux anything in mind, with Containers and Flatpak