👋 right on! I actually also have used containers as a key to my security layout before, but yeah you miss out on all the benefits of portage.

I was doing something crazy and actually running Gentoo inside each one! It was very difficult to stay up-to-date. But I basically had my host as barebones as possible and used LibVirt containers for everything, attempting to make a few templates that I could keep updated and base other VMs on. I was able to keep this up for about two years then I had to relax (was my main PC). But it was really secure, and it does work.

The benefit of encapsulation is that you have a lot of freedom inside each container, like install a different distro if you need to. Also as long as they are isolated you don’t need to worry as much about their individual security. But it’s still good to. I ran SELinux on the host and non-SELinux (but hardened) in the guests.

SELinux has a lot of advantages over users/groups, but I think the latter can be just as secure if you know what you’re doing. For example with SELinux you can prevent certain applications from accessing the network, or restrict access to certain ports, etc. It’s also useful for desktop environments where a lot of GUI apps run under one user- e.g. neither my main user nor any other program can access my keepassxc directory, only the keepassxc process (and root) can (even though the application is running under my main user). You can also restrict root quite a bit, especially if you compile in the option to prevent disabling SELinux at boot (I need to recompile my kernel to disable it).

But again while it is fun to learn, it is quite a pain and I’ve relaxed the setup on my new computer to use a different user for everything (including gui apps), which I think is secure enough for me. But this style relies on my ability to adhere to it, whereas with SELinux you can set it up to where you’re forced to

Like others have mentioned, SELinux could be a great addition. It can be a massive pain, but it’s really effective at locking things down (if configured properly).

However, the difficulty will depend on the distro. I use it with Gentoo, which has plenty of support/docs for it and provides policies for many packages. Although (when running strict policy types) I usually end up needing to adjust them or write my own.

Obviously Red Hat would be another good choice, but I haven’t tried it. Fedora also has good support, but I’ve only ever used the OOTB targeted policies.

That said, I’ve started relying on users/groups more often lately, since it really gets in the way of everything.

I alternate between helix and vim depending on the task, and their key bindings are kind of opposite from each other in a lot of ways. I’ve found that switching back and forth has kept me on my toes a bit and I don’t feel as locked in to one editor as I did with vim before trying helix.

So I’m now stuck with my customized neovim, devoid of any hope of abandoning this strange addiction.

I would also try getting used to the defaults or a minimal config, which is also a good way to feel at home in the editor regardless of the system

If you want to mess around with scripting instead of an editor I would recommend Awk- it works great for CSV files and is really powerful. Usually you can use -F, to separate using commas, but for full CSV support (with potential quoted commas) you need to use something like -vFPAT='[^,]*|"[^"]*"' (which isn’t POSIX compliant but works with gawk)

I’m not sure how to paste directly into a pane, but you can copy by opening up the scrollback in EDITOR from search mode using Ctrl+S e. This creates a file in /tmp so I try to make sure to clear it when I’m done.

I usually only copy and paste between editor windows using a script that mimics xclip (automatically used by helix), and if I need to paste a command I either edit my bash history or write a script.

Great list. Customizing the font is definitely a priority. I recommend one of the Terminus fonts. Also zellij multiplexer + helix editor is a great combo that works well in the tty.

One thing to add is that it took me a while to create a decent 16-color theme for helix and vim, and while they’re okay by default you can actually get a pretty nice looking IDE if you spend some time tinkering with the colors

I have this device and use it to store my keepassxc and onlykey backups, and it’s useful to me because I’ve stopped using passwords (I only need to remember the pins for these devices which can unlock my keepass dbs that have everything else).

It seems secure enough for my use case, especially since the files I store in it are themselves encrypted (the onlykey backup still requires a pin), but I still want them to be difficult to access.

I’ve had to rely on it before but only because I didn’t prepare a backup onlykey ahead of time- ideally it should be one of many recovery methods. But so far it’s worked great for me.

Maybe try programming? It’s incredibly exciting once you get the hang of it. It can be frustrating at times but it’s really rewarding. Since becoming my hobby/job its given me an endless source of things to do at home. Plus it can open up new career paths :)

mpd + ncmpcpp

Yeah for me it’s been great and I do essentially leave it plugged in the whole time I’m using my PC (attached to my keys). It does require a pin entered each boot, so leaving it in would still offer security. But as someone else mentioned getting kwallet PAM working would make things easier in any case

Lol. I press a button on the device (which I unlocked with a pin before boot), but it would be nice to have the DB unlock automatically

Personally, I’ve relied on an OnlyKey for a few years (with backups and an extra fallback device) and haven’t needed to type passwords since. This doesn’t help with the number of prompts, but it does make them easier to dismiss.

I do use autologin, but I don’t use a system wallet (only KeePassXC, which I do need to unlock manually). Autologin with system wallets can be tricky, but I’ve had some luck setting it up in the past. You might want to check out this wiki for PAM configuration.

If you’re willing to spend the time to learn how to write custom policies, SELinux can be used for this, to some extent. It’s highly customizable and can sandbox your apps, but the process of doing so is quite complicated. I wrote a small guide on custom policy management on Gentoo in another comment if you’re interested.

There’s also apparently a “sandbox” feature, but I don’t know much about it. I just write my own policies and make them as strict as possible.

As an example, my web browser can’t access my home directory or anything except its own directories, and nobody (including my own user), except root and a few select processes (gpg, gpg-agent, git, pass) can access my gnupg directory.

This only covers security/permissions, and doesn’t include many of the other benefits of containerization or isolation. You could also try KVM with libvirt and Gentoo VMs; that works pretty well (despite update times) and I did that for a while with some success.

I learned by watching a bunch of cppcon videos, reading cppreference, and writing a lot of programs. Learning how to understand the error messages is also really important

I use Terminus (ter-112n) for TTY, Source Code Pro for terminal emulators, and DejaVu, Liberation, and Noto for others

Had the same issue with Plasma Wayland in QEMU but I never found a solution. Toggling anti-aliasing sometimes helped, temporarily

No problem! And yeah, it’s good to see people talking about it over here. I think it’s the best tool for online privacy OOTB (depending on your threat model), and it gets better the more people use it.

The difference is that your ISP doesn’t know where your packets are headed, and the destination doesn’t know where your packets came from. The ISP sees you connect to the entrance node and the destination sees you connect from the exit node, and it’s very difficult for anyone to trace the connection back to you (unless they own both the entrance and exit and use traffic coorelation or some other exploit/fingerprint). Regardless, both parties are generally able to tell that you are using TOR if they reference lists of known entrance/exit nodes. Also the anti-fingerprinting measures taken by TB are a bit more strict than other privacy-focused browsers

It’s great for anything low bandwidth that isn’t tied to your identity, and helps for peace of mind, despite its issues. You do run into captcha or DDOS protection issues occasionally, but the new tor circuit for this site button sometimes works. Also it uses letterboxing to prevent resolution-based fingerprinting, which isn’t very pretty, but leaving it at its default size (or locking the size using the WM) works well and is good for privacy.