I use a wacom intuos + xournal++.

The wacom is nice because it has bluetooth and pretty much “just works” on Linux.

Xournal++ lets me edit pdf files and/or export stuff as pdf. I also like that I can add text with xournal++.

I thought you were going to link to this.

I don’t think so, now. You’ll have to do those yourself.

Which means my distro-morphing idea should work in theory with OpenStack

I also don’t recommend doing a manual install though, as it’s extremely complex compared to automated deployment solutions like kolla-ansible (openstack in docker containers), openstack-ansible (host os/lxc containers), or openstack-helm/genestack/atmosphere (openstack on kubernetes). They make the install much more simpler and less time consuming, while still being intensely configurable.

Personally, I think Proxmox is somewhat unsecure too.

Proxmox is unique from other projects, in it’s much more hacky, and much of the stack is custom rather than standards. Like for example: For networking, they maintain a fork of the Linux’s older networking stack, called ifupdown2, whereas similar projects, like openstack, or Incus, use either the standard Linux kernel networking, or a project called openvswitch.

I think Proxmox is definitely secure enough, but I don’t know if I would really trust it for higher value usecases due to some of their stack being custom, rather than standard and mantained by the wider community.

If I end up wanting to run Proxmox, I’ll install Debian, distro-morph it to Kicksecure

If you’re interested in deploying a hypervisor on top of an existing operating system, I recommend looking into Incus or Openstack. They have packages/deployments than can be done on Debian or Red Hat distros, and I would argue that they are designed in a more secure manner (since they include multi tenancy) than Proxmox. In addition to that, they also use standard tooling for networking, like both can use Linux Bridge (in-kernel networking) for networking operations.

I would trust Openstack the most when it comes to security, because it is designed to be used as a public cloud, like having your own AWS, and it is deployed with components publicly accessible in the real world.

Again, this is distracting from the original argument to make some kind of tertiary argument unrelated to the original one: Is ssh secure to expose to the internet?

You said no. That is the argument being contested.

This is moving the goal posts. You went from “ssh is not fine to expose” to “VPN’s add security”. While the second is true, it’s not what was being argued.

Never expose your SSH port on the public web,

Linux was designed as a multi user system. My college, Cal State Northridge, has an ssh server you can connect to, and put your site up. Many colleges continue to have a similar setup, and by putting stuff in your homedir you can have a website at no cost.

There are plenty of usecases which involve exposing ssh to the public internet.

And when it comes to raw vulnerabilities, ssh has had vastly less than stuff like apache httpd, which powers wordpress sites everywhere but has had so many path traversal and RCE vulns over the years.

Firstly, Xen is considered by secure by Qubes — but that’s mainly the security of the hypervisor and virtualization system itself. They make a very compelling argument that escaping a Xen based virtual machine is going to be more difficult than a KVM virtual machine.

But threat model matters a lot. Qubes aims to be the most secure OS ever, for use cases like high profile journalists or other people who absolutely need security, because they will literally get killed without it.

Amazon moved to KVM because, despite the security trade off’s, it’s “good enough” for their usecase, and KVM is easier to manage because it’s in the Linux kernel itself, meaning you get it if you install Linux on a machine.

In addition to that, security is about more than just the hypervisor. You noted that Promox is Debian, and XCP-NG is Centos or a RHEL rebuild similar to Rocky/Alma, I think. I’ll get to this later.

Xen (and by extension XCP-NG) was better known for security whilst KVM (and thus Proxmox)

I did some research on this, and was planning to make a blogpost and never got around to making it. But I still have the draft saved.

The short version is: it depends, and they can fluctuate slightly on certain tasks, but they are mostly the same in performance.

default PROXMOX and XCP-NG installations.

What do you mean by hardening? If you are talking about hardening the management operating system (Proxmox’s Debian or XCP’s RHEL-like), or the hypervisor itself?

I agree with the other poster about CIS hardening and generally hardening the base operating system used. But I will note that XCP-NG is more designed to be an “appliance” and you’re not really supposed to touch it. I wouldn’t be suprised if it’s immutable nowadays.

For the hypervisor itself, it depends on how secure you want things, but I’ve heard that at Microsoft Azure datacenters, they disable hyperthreading because it becomes a security risk. In fact, Spectre/Meltdown can be mitigated by disabling hyper threading. Of course, their are other ways to mitigate those two vulnerabilities, but by disabling hyper threading, you can eliminate that entire class of vulnerabilities — at the cost of performance.

Openstack cluster!

The documentation has long since been changed.

Note that the anon user is able to become root without a password by default, as a development convenience. To prevent this, remove anon from the wheel group and it will no longer be able to run /bin/su.

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/commit/a2a6bc534868773b9320ec3ca7399283cf7a375b (this seems to have also switched to gender neutral language in other parts.'of the documentation and comments as well).

Original drama: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814

Xplore but it’s not foss.

Can’t you run ddg without javascript, on their plain html version?

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/

If you have an older nvidia gpu, you can use vgpu unlock to unlock these features on that.

If you don’t trust the authors, don’t install it (duh).

Just because I trust the authors to write good rust/javascript/etc code, doesn’t mean I trust them to write good bash, especially given how many footguns bash has.

Steam once deleted a users home directory.

But: I do agree with you. I think curl | bash is reasonable for package managers like nix or brew. And then once those are installed, it’s better to get software like the Bun OP mentions from them, rather than from curl | bash.

Trust and security aren’t just about protecting from malice, but also mistakes.

For example, AUR packages are basically install scripts, and there have been a few that have done crazy things like delete a users /bin — not out of any malice, but rather simple human error.

Binaries are going to be much, much less prone to these mistakes because they are in languages the creators have more experience with, and are comfortable in. Just because I trust someone to write code that runs on my computer, doesn’t mean I trust them to write an install script, especially given how many footguns bash has.

Steam once deleted someone’s home directory.

Here’s my main argument for more private services (I try to make all my arguments short).

According to a study done by proton, a single company makes a minimum of $200 dollars off of each person, each year. Of course, they probably gain more money via clandestine deals or the government buying data directly to get around the 4th amendment.

But that money, doesn’t go solely to the companies dedicated to collecting data, or those parts of other companies. It goes to lobbying the government to strip away privacy further.

And then I have two endings, depending on the situation:

1. Of course, I recognize that in today’s connected world, I can’t get privacy unless I go live in the woods. But I can decrease the amount of money companies make off my data, which I do like.

2. Organizations like the EFF, lobby on the other side, for more privacy for us. But they are opposed by when massive companies like google also lobby. So when I deny google $100, that’s money they can’t use to lobby anymore. Rather than thinking of it as denying google money, think of it as making a donation to the EFF, that they use to ensure our rights are in place.

Along with the other bits that people like and dislike about it, I have another problem with it.

In order to deploy software in a manner that is resilient, it’s necessary to deploy it in a “High Available” manner. This usually involves duplicated the service across multiple machines, and then automatically switching from one server to the next if one machine goes down. I consider this necessary for something to be a true alternative to the big proprietary software like discord/slack/etc, for smaller groups or nonprofits who want more reliability. Someone losing internet at their house should not result in the whole service going down. A datacenter going up in flames should not result in that lemmy instance going down (forgot which one this happened to, but I’m referencing a real thing).

The most common way (and arguably, one of the easiest) to do high availability is Kubernetes. Kubernetes has a sort of package manager, called helm where you can quickly spin up services in a highly available manner. Many services offer official helm charts (Unofficial ones are not going to be maintained reliably, so I don’t like them).

The helm chart for Synapse and the rest is enterprise only meaning you have to pay. Discovering this is what finally really soured me on Matrix as using it as a discord alternative.

Of course, I never really considered Matrix a discord alternative. It lacks certain features that people want, mentioned below, like voice rooms (although voice rooms are by definition, metadata leakage, meaning people who dislike matrix for the metadata leakage would dislike voice rooms lol).

Rocketchat appeals to me because of this. Kubernetes/helm, single sign on, and interestingly, it seems to be able to federate with matrix (although I don’t know if it supports e2ee with matrix). It seems that rocketchat has it’s own e2ee, though I don’t know how it works (or if it’s any good). It also seems to support matrix clients, but doesn’t seem to actually be based on matrix.

But otherwise, rocketchat seems like a much better discord alternative.

Freshtomato is not out of date. The last stable release was december of 2024 And the github repos are being actively updated as well.

Perhaps you are confusing freshtomato with some of it’s predecessors, like tomato or advancedtomato, which are no longer currently maintained.

As for openwrt instead, that doesn’t support broadcom wifi chips, whereas freshtomato does.

This is like that other recommendation of a linuxserver/kasmvnc docker image as well. It doesn’t allow for collaborative editing like cryptpad or google docs does.

This is so horrifically wrong, I don’t even know where to start.

The short version is that phone and computer makers aren’t stupid and they will kill things or shutdown when overheating happens. If you were a phone maker, why tf would you allow someone to fry their own phone?

My laptop has shut itself off when I was trying to compile code while playing video games, while watching twitch. My android phone has killed apps when I try to do too much as well.