The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[DavidS877]

dd finally got me after a hundred uses. USB stick was on /dev/sda and internal storage drive was on /dev/sdb somehow

Check your lsblk folks, this is a warning

Or just upgrade everything to nvme.

 

[Betonhaus]

dd finally got me after a hundred uses. USB stick was on /dev/sda and internal storage drive was on /dev/sdb somehow

Check your lsblk folks, this is a warning

you booted with the USB drive plugged in?

 

[DavidS877]

Or just upgrade everything to nvme.

And to be 3.1% less flippant, you can also use /dev/disk/by-id/usb(tab)

 

[Anti Snigger]

lsblk -o NAME,UUID or lsblk -f before I do anything. A working fstab makes your life easier.

 

[Carpe Jugulum]

I want to switch to Linux full time, but I'm always having issues on my main PC with my graphics always being a pain in the ass to deal with at my max refresh rate 165Hz. I have a 3080, but I always heard that Nvidia is a bitch to deal with when it comes to drivers on Linux. Would it be easier to switch to an AMD card instead, or has Nvidia gotten a bit better? I'm eyeing the 7900XT as a replacement potentially.

I have a 3080rtx, game exclusively on Linux, have 3 monitors (1 x 180fps, 2 x 60fps) on x11, with proprietary nvidia drivers and they’ve never given me a problem besides that issue Arch had the other week when you couldn’t update without removing and re-adding linux-firmware (this affected my none nvidia laptop too).

 

[AnOminous]

dd finally got me after a hundred uses. USB stick was on /dev/sda and internal storage drive was on /dev/sdb somehow

Check your lsblk folks, this is a warning

I live in terror of that. I won't even touch that shit unless I haven't had so much as a beer in a week or two.

 

[Fledgling Neuromancer]

This is probably one of the most annoying issues you can encounter with AMD GPUs: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/2950

Only happens during near idle desktop usage, not gaming, but requires a monitor restart with desktops that can recover from GPU hangs. Without recovery support, say bye to your session.

I've had something with the same symptoms happen in a very specific area of one game, but it went away after I disabled anti-aliasing so I think it was just a bug with the game. That was the worst Linux gaming issue I've had.

Also, unfortunately under Wine some cutscenes in some games do not play because there isn't an open source decoder for it. Examples include the Windows versions of Resident Evil and the DMC HD collection on Steam.

 

[Slav Power]

dd finally got me after a hundred uses. USB stick was on /dev/sda and internal storage drive was on /dev/sdb somehow

Check your lsblk folks, this is a warning

Whenever I do partition work, I double, triple, quadruple check that I've gotten everything
right before I let it rip, and even though I do get it right I still feel like I didn't.

Also an anecdote: one time while trying to install Kubuntu for dual booting on my old Win7 HDD it managed to fuck up the installation so bad that it dropped the partition table. TestDisk recovered it no problem and I suffered zero data loss.

 

[Betonhaus]

Has anyone tried installing Xlibre on Debian? I might try it when Debian 13 and therefor LMDE7 gets released

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

Are distros just a big scam to keep people scared of Linux?

Think about the work it would take to build Linux from scratch. Linux is Linux, regardless of whether it's Debian, Gentoo, Arch, etc. At the end of the day, you're just choosing a build environment where someone has already done all the cross-compiling for you. Because of how modular Linux is, you could technically install any package manager, service manager, or even kernel from any distribution. People often get too caught up in distros for either political reasons or unnecessary haughtiness.

 

[jONALD]

So it boils down to “MY LOGO IS BETTER THAN YOURS!” or very, very niche preferences or needs.

 

[Froggy Fresh Sextape]

So it boils down to “MY LOGO IS BETTER THAN YOURS!” or very, very niche preferences or needs.

There are major differences between them, but the reality is that people who work for a living typically use Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora/RHEL/Debian/SuSE and the rest is a wasteland piled high with autism.

 

[Ferryman]

Speaking of really niche preferences, Ima be upfront, I'm bout to type some wack ass shit cause its been on my mind lowkey no cap, so sneed it or feed it. TLDR sperging about paranoid security on the OS level

In the wake of the recent (west)world-wide push for increased surveillance, I want to start a little discussion: what do you think would be the best way to insulate yourself from prying eyes at the OS level? Or rather, which OS would you choose as the base for a 'secure' browsing machine? I'm only focusing on one machine directly exposed to the Internet here, because having shit like hardware firewalls doing packet cleaning or OpenWRT routers might be a bit too much to talk about up front. Ignoring the fact that 99% of "incidents" are due to human error, lets talk technicalities for a bit. For paranoid-level security, it'd need something like Tor-over-VPN routing, and since there is not any real pressure to gimp VPNs as of right now, Mullvad is the number one choice. This is assuming that the ISP is also a hostile entity. The next concern is fingerprinting. For browser fingerprinting, stock Tor Browser, Librewolf and Mullvad are pretty well hardened. For device level fingerprinting you can spoof your mac address & OS and DNS cleaning with tools like Parrot's AnonSurf, and Mullvad-through-Wireguard is also really nice for preventing DNS leakage, but TCP/IP fingerprinting remains an issue. So, in my mind, it comes down to:

1. Tails with pseudo-persistence; my idea was to dd it onto an NVMe and have it live inside of a laptop, where eveyrthing but the boot space is set up as persistent storage with the built in feature of the same name, then install whatever other software & config files are needed on there; every reboot makes it do its thing and completely reset, then whenever it boots back up, you unlock the encrypted part and everything clicks back into place, or if you don't need it, you can roll around with just the amnestic basline; should show up as generic Linux/Debian; cancer to set up, but might be very good if done right

2. Whonix / Qubes where everything is a VM; excellent compartmentalization means it is very easy to split tasks into their own little isolated VM, thus avoiding ye olde opsec fuckup of cross contamination (to an extent); resource heavy, really cancer to maintain, really cancer to set up, really cancer to use in general (note: I have never used Qubes so I am speaking from what I have read); could be a good driver if set up right but seems like a very large time sink; fingerprinting should be fine as it runs a Fedora base in dom0

3. OpenBSD because it is definitely super secure by default with really useful tools for super duper hardening, excellent code cleanliness and a very autistic community that is devoted to its cause, only trouble is it would light up like a christmas tree in network sniffs due to TCP/IP uniqueness

4. Kodachi is a distro I know basically nothing about, but seemingly comes packed with a suite of privacy tools out of the box; annoying that it relies on systemd, as to almost all the other suggestions here, but it is what it is; based on an older Ubuntu version (18...), but I see it get mentioned quite often in security discussion circles, so might be worth looking into

5. Devuan / Artix / Antix / other sysd-free distros with all the aforementioned privacy hardening tools installed manually; probably the best bet for a daily driver that isn't super cancer to upkeep; probably a bit more than just a little risky because it relies purely on one's own capacity for manual hardening and technical expertise, I trust myself a good bit but I am not immune to human error

Ultimately the OS might not matter as much as the network hardening here, but it can't hurt to have a baseline that's already strong which you can then build on. Sorry for the autistic rant, been meaning to talk about this but most of the cysec people I know in real life are corpo goons that don't care for privacy as much as they probably should. Right now I'm considering going for #5, but keeping #1 or #2 in my back pocket in case the wack meter keeps going up, which it very well might.

Edit: The anti-systemd shit is part of the paranoia; just like Windows and MacOS/Darwin are spyware operating systems that don't give a rat's ass about user privacy and will openly stuff telemetry out their asses, I can certainly see a future where RH et al. commit a full corporate takeover of the Linux kernel, or most mainline Linux OSes in general, through shit like systemd etc.; again, this is about the paranoid perspective.

 

[Blackhole]

In the wake of the recent (west)world-wide push for increased surveillance, I want to start a little discussion: what do you think would be the best way to insulate yourself from prying eyes at the OS level? Or rather, which OS would you choose as the base for a 'secure' browsing machine? I'm only focusing on one machine directly exposed to the Internet here, because having shit like hardware firewalls doing packet cleaning or OpenWRT routers might be a bit too much to talk about up front. Ignoring the fact that 99% of "incidents" are due to human error, lets talk technicalities for a bit.

If glowniggers are really after you, physical security is way more important than your OS. Having an encrypted hardened Qubes install is meaningless if you have a gun to your head! Devuan or Artix with VeraCrypt is good enough.

 

[Aidan]

As always, it depends on what you're trying to mitigate. The "surveillance state" is mostly mitigated by setting up custom DNS, using a VPN (often uses its own DNS), not using software with heaps of telemetry, and using end-to-end encrypted chats that you can actually delete or something that otherwise keeps them out of the loop.
Beyond that you're either worrying about a backdoor into some serious mainstream software with a lot of eyes on it (eg systemd or the kernel itself) or worried about being directly hacked by the state, which you're probably not going to avoid if you're at that point without a lot of hoop jumping like using Tails or maybe Qubes.

 

[Baguette Child]

Snowden recommended Tails as his operating system of choice. Which to me says something considering he may have the most concrete reason to be paranoid about his security out of anyone.

 

[y a t s]

Snowden recommended Tails as his operating system of choice. Which to me says something considering he may have the most concrete reason to be paranoid about his security out of anyone.

I remember him endorsing Qubes at one point. I imagine he's only using Tails as a live USB, and perhaps he uses Qubes or similar for daily driver tasks.

 

[Froggy Fresh Sextape]

2. Whonix / Qubes where everything is a VM; excellent compartmentalization means it is very easy to split tasks into their own little isolated VM, thus avoiding ye olde opsec fuckup of cross contamination (to an extent); resource heavy, really cancer to maintain, really cancer to set up, really cancer to use in general (note: I have never used Qubes so I am speaking from what I have read); could be a good driver if set up right but seems like a very large time sink; fingerprinting should be fine as it runs a Fedora base in dom0

This is what I would recommend, assuming you're most worried about privacy and don't have the NSA trying to track you down or something.

It is quite RAM hungry and you'll most likely have to reboot every couple of days due to how Xen manages memory allocation but is otherwise pretty smooth once you get everything set up. It doesn't take that long.

 

[Anti Snigger]

I remember him endorsing Qubes at one point. I imagine he's only using Tails as a live USB, and perhaps he uses Qubes or similar for daily driver tasks.

I'm probably very ignorant for saying this, but doesn't Qubes have an almost prohibitive overhead? I remember wanting to try it almost a decade ago, and at the time it required something like 6GB just for the OS

 

[Froggy Fresh Sextape]

I'm probably very ignorant for saying this, but doesn't Qubes have an almost prohibitive overhead? I remember wanting to try it almost a decade ago, and at the time it required something like 6GB just for the OS

RAM is the main issue. It's usable with 16GB but I'd consider that the bare minimum.