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by microtonal 2068 days ago
high privacy

If you don't care that random X11 applications (e.g. your browser) can snoop keystrokes and mouse events or make screengrabs of any other X11 application.

But it doesn't matter anyway, because any application can grab any data from your home directory.

Unless you use Flatpak, bubblewrap, or some other sandboxing technology.

Disclaimer: I use Linux 95% of the time. But we should be honest about the shortcomings. Desktop Linux is not secure and you only have privacy if you trust all of your applications.
4 comments
akalsz 2068 days ago
> But we should be honest about the shortcomings. Desktop Linux is not secure and you only have privacy if you trust all of your applications.

No operating system is secure when it comes to installing untrusted applications. The strength of desktop Linux is the vast amounts of available free and open-source software, ergo software that you can actually trust. To my knowledge, no other OS beats that - usually you can't even trust your OS itself these days.

Plus we already have a universally supported sandboxing technology, it's our web browser. I can use Microsoft's software inside a Firefox container when I'm forced to, without giving them access to my home folder, keystrokes/mouse events, etc. Even better, half of the requests those things would make are blocked by uBO.

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ajvs 2068 days ago
Everyone who cares about privacy uses Firefox browser for other reasons already so browser was a poor example.

There's also Wayland as a replacement for X11, but granted not all applications support it.

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eitland 2068 days ago
It's not like there isn't a number of screen recording and keylogging tools and/or malware available for any mainstream desktop OS.

Your comment makes it sound like this is a problem that only X11 has.

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microtonal 2068 days ago
It's not like there isn't a number of screen recording and keylogging tools and/or malware available for any mainstream desktop OS.

Sandboxed macOS apps (e.g. anything from the Mac App Store) cannot log keystrokes or make screen grabs without the user giving explicit permission to do so.

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sergeykish 2068 days ago
Fine for open source applications. Sandbox would be improvement.

How can one trust closed source software?

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