Hi, Im searching for a secure distro for normal daily use for my laptop. Currently Im running arch linux with full disk encryption, secure boot, linux hardened, firewalld and most apps as flatpaks (with some disabled permissions using flatseal). I think its pretty secure laptop but it could be more secure.
Tails and Whonix are the most secure but they are not ment for normal daily use…
There is a lot of new immutable distros. Getting (system) malware is harder to get on them. Im most interested in blendOS, because its based. Does anyone know if it has full disk encryption, secure boot, etc. or can it be done by the user? What about other distros like Fedora Silverblue?
Any other recommendations?
Thank you :)
While technically not a Linux distro, Qubes OS is the gold standard. With the primary cons being that it’s kinda hard on system requirements and it doesn’t play nice with dedicated GPUs and thus software that would require it.
Honorable mentions would be Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite/Sericea, Kicksecure, openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa and Vanilla OS. Of course, regular Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed are still good even without being immutable. The aforementioned distros all have varying levels of hardening out of the box. While the offerings of Fedora and openSUSE have better defaults than most other distros, Kicksecure -which is made by the same team behind Whonix- is almost completely hardened from the get-go. Vanilla OS is in a major overhaul, so I refrain from making any strong judgements on it yet.
For whatever it’s worth, a couple of years ago the (infamous) Madaidan (AKA security researcher on Kicksecure and Whonix) did recommend running minimalist distros like Alpine, Artix, Gentoo and Void for the sake of security. However, he did that recommendation on the basis of minimalism and zero-trust. However, that would require the system administrator (read: you) to actually know their shit. Which, unfortunately, is often times not the case as not everyone that’s sensitive of their digital security proceeds to study cybersecurity. That’s where the “honorable mentions” in the previous paragraph come into play; all of the distros that were mentioned within actually have shown to take security very seriously and acknowledge with the amount of heavy-lifting they do that they hold a sense of responsibility in that regard.
Im most interested in blendOS, because its based.
I once had an interaction with its primary developer and the dude was oblivious on which MAC was configured on his distro; spoiler-alert: none. It does a bunch of cool stuff, but I wouldn’t call it secure (by default) by any stretch of the imagination.
Thank you for your detailed answer! Im already using a minimalist distro (arch) with (almost) no problems. Before that I used Fedora. Becase of that and your recommendation I will probably switch to silverblue. Im a little scared of selinux (I was thinkering too much with fedora) but better with it than without. For AUR apps I will use distrobox. I would also like to try toolbx for my projects!
Becase of that and your recommendation I will probably switch to silverblue.
Silverblue is incidentally also my daily-driver; custom image through uBlue’s template to be more precise*.
Im a little scared of selinux (I was thinkering too much with fedora) but better with it than without.
Yup, SELinux is definitely a double-edged sword in that it’s very powerful but can therefore be a bit more restrictive. Though, currently it’s our only bet when it comes to confining containers as it’s (vastly) superior over AppArmor in that aspect. Which explains openSUSE’s recent conversion from AppArmor to SELinux for their distros that rely heavily on container workflows; like MicroOS, Aeon, Kalpa etc. Unfortunately it’s not the easiest to understand, but I’m sure you’ll manage 😉!
For AUR apps I will use distrobox.
Hehe, you know what’s good 😛.
I guess you’re getting to the point in security where you really should consider the cost/benefit of safety vs convenience. Do you really want or need to have an immutable system? While there’s obviously an argument to be made about the security benefits on those distros, I’d say that they’re mainly made for CI/CD, cloud environments etc, and probably not something you want to put in a laptop and use as a daily driver. Your laptop is likely already more secure than 99% of other laptops, and in the end all you need to not get malware are a firewall and common sense if you’re not an exposed entity.
I’d say that they’re mainly made for CI/CD, cloud environments etc, and probably not something you want to put in a laptop and use as a daily driver.
Why do you think that? Would you be so kind to elaborate?
Your setup is already pretty good, but I can recommend Silverblue with my personal use.
Thank you! Does silverblue support full disk encryption and secure boot?
Yes it does
Great, I will try it!
Also has an extensive SElinux setup.
Great, thats one thing I miss about my current setup.
What’s your use case?
Programming, school, and everything else.
You don’t need a security focused distro to hide the hentai from your mom, nor to shield your 0.0047 XMR from hackers.
And you dont need a lemmy account for posting useless comments
I do actually, you can’t post as guest.
Why are you looking for security so much with that, besides paranoia that is. Welcome to the club.
Puppy Linux - the OS is spooled into RAM from a single signed compressed image. by default there is no write back to physical data store; this can include user folders etc. each boot can be a clean slate.
Since the OS itself is in a single compressed & signed package, if someone alters it via a sidecar boot to an alt OS, it and you would know.
When there are chain of custody issues it is pretty secure when added with the usual bevy of other securing options.
nixos. make containers, easy encryption and firewall config, immutable /etc and a lot of small stuff that makes this more secure
I’m not really into security-focused distros, but heard good things about QubesOS. Also, what about OpenBSD?
Openbsd is really good but it is not linux. It doesn’t have as much packages as linux and may perform a bit slower on applications compared to it’s linux counterpart. Also, drivers for some hardware may not be available for Openbsd. Some filesystems like btrfs are not supported.
Still, openbsd and freebsd are worth checking out for learning about UNIX like OSes and routers, servers etc. It can also be daily driven if you can make do with the available packages.
We are talking about programming, studying, surfing the web and average computer usage. OpenBSD is more than enough for all that.
Openbsd IS based. It might not be for the average joe, and it’s never cutting edge. FreeBSD is though. And Netbsd can run on just about anything
How is blendOS based?
And personally most distros will do since linux is secure over all. I like Linux Mint personally and is good for programming and generic use.
OpenBSD.
Period.
Sure, you can harden Linux to the same level of security. But OpenBSD comes with all the goodies installed out of the box.
Few of the recommendations here are good for general use. I’d recommend fedora silverblue
You want Qubes. And keep a stick of TAILS on you for high-risk situations. But Qubes is your easy daily driver.
Depends on your use case, but any up-to-date distro is secure. Security issues mainly comes from the user’s actions.
Use qubes os I guess
a secure distro for normal daily use
Any distro, really. Tails and Tor may have some extra features but aren’t mandatory by any means. Just make sure Common Sense Antivirus ™ is g2g and you should be good.
I would recommend VanillaOS because it’s not as difficult as QubesOS and immutable with encryption.
