• onlinepersona@programming.dev
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    3 hours ago

    Linux allows nearly endless customisation. But when making a desktop distro, you have to weigh convenience and security. You can be the most secure OS on the planet, but if nothing can run because of that, nobody will use it.

    Go ahead and try to use Fedora with all security options activated. Give it a try and find out how much you like it. I bet that once you have to resolve your first SELinux issue that prevents you from running your favorite application, you’ll start being more lax or drop it all together.

    I think already know the answer to this, but which OS do you think is the most secure?

    • Haley@lemmus.org
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      3 hours ago

      It’s really hard to quantify an answer to that final question, because realistically, any OS connected to the internet leaves itself more vulnerable than any OS air gapped, so that’s already inherently a tradeoff. If I go purely on a purity test? TempleOS. It’s not daily driveable, but it technically wins due to the fact that Terry did not code any network support at all into it.

      You’re definitely right about the convenience tradeoffs, but some of that shit is just blatantly egregious, particularly with Arch and the AUR, yet Linuxtubers still swear by it and still tell new converts they don’t need to be careful, which is ignorance at best and negligence at worst. Even worse are the ones that openly advocate you use an LLM to figure this stuff out. That kind of mindset toward new users hurts us more than many realize.

      SecureBlue doesn’t claim to be the most secure option, its whole model is trying to strike a balance between security and convenience. It’s just that a lot of distros are so far behind that their ideas seem extreme. I ran a Lynis audit on my Fedora system recently and I got a 77/100 score. That’s probably enough for the average person, and that was after downloading their sysctl rules from their github, commenting out about 3 or 4 options that I didn’t really need, and importing them all into my configuration.