News at 11: Senior C++ committee member still does not understand what memory safe means.
Seriously: C++ does not "archive parity with other memory-safe languages" (emphasis mine) since it is not a memory safe language itself, even if profiles deliver on everything they promise today.
I use cargo-dist to generate the binaries.
As a user I definitely want flatpaks and use them over distribution packages whereever possible. First I can sandbox the flatpak, but not the native package. Why would my browser need to be able to read my ssh keys?
Secondly I just have seen too many distro packagers sabotaging packages in the most braindead ways possible. Debian removing almost all the random data during key generation because some static analysis tool did not like the code. To this day there are servers using one of the 32k keys debian could produce during that time (they are of course all brute forced by now). Fedora removing Codecs from a video encoder, dependencies that upstream knows are broken and listsmas such in its documentation being used anyway. Random patches being applied, or versions years out of date getting shipped...
If you find a reliable way to allow for people to use data without being able to copy it: Patent it right away, the entertainment industry will be paying big time for it.
Same for erasing the laptop: You can only erase something as long as you can talk to the machine in some way to instruct it to clean itself up. The guy with the machine in hand can just turn off wifi to stop it from receiving the message...
My coworker used it till his HDD broke, taking his key into data heaven. The repository is still online thanks to radicale, but he has no way to ever get push access to it again.
So it is useless as any misstep can potentially kill your access to the repo.
Yes, I should not have said "impossible": nothing is ever impossible to breach. All you can donis to make a breach more expensive to accomplish.
Those separate tpm chips are getting rare... most of the time they are build into the CPU (or firmware) nowadays. That makes sniffing harder, but probably opens other attack vectors.
Anyway: Using a TPM chip makes it more expensive to extract your keys than not using such a chip. So yoj win by using one.
A TPM is a very slow and dumb chip: It can hash data somebody sends to it and it can encrypt and decrypt data slowly. That's basically it. There is no privacy concern there that I can see. That chip can not read or write memory nor talk to the network.
Together with early boot code in the firmware/bootloader/initrd and later user space that chip can do quite a few cool things.
That code will use the TPM to measure data (create a hash) it loads before transfering control over and then unlock secrets only if the measurements match expected values. There is no way to extract that key on any system with different measurements (like a different computer, or even a different OS on the same computer). I find that pretty interesting and would love to use that, but most distributions do not offer that functionality yet :-(
Using the TPM to unlock the disks is just as secure as leaving the booted computer somewhere. If you trust the machine to not let random people log in, then TPM-based unlocking is fine. If you do not: Stay away.
Extracting the keys locked to an TPM is supposed to be impossible, so you do not need to worry about somebody stealing your keys. That alone makes TPMs very interesting... your own little FIDO tocken build right intomyour machine:-)
"They" did not go anywhere yet. This is a proposal, nothing more. It will take serious discussions over years to get this into C++.
Prominent figures already said they prefer safety profiles as a less intrusive and more C++ approach at conferences It will be fun to watch this and the other safety proposals going forward.
Well, its a brand new standard library. A fresh start.
Read the proposal: Lifetimes annotations, the rust standard library (incl. basic types like Vec, ARc, ...), first class tuples, pattern matching, destructive moves, unsafe, it is all in there.
The proposal is really to bolt on Rust to the side of C++, with all the compatibility problems that brings by necessity.
Not only that: It protects your data. The Unix security model is unfortunately stuck in the 1970s: It protects users from each other. That is a wonderful property, but in todays world you also need to protect the users from the applications they are running: Anything running as your user has access to all your data. And on most computer systems the interesting data is the one the users out there: Cryptogrqphic keys, login information, financial information, ... . Typically users are much more upset to loose their data than about some virus infecting the OS files, those are trivial to fix.
Running anything as anlther user stops that application from having access to most of your data.
This is the presentation from FOSDEM about the OS:
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4057-particleos-can-we-make-lennart-poettering-run-an-image-based-distribution-/