You can use Fuse to encrypt files on the fly using a wide assortment of schemas. The trick is to make it available at the right time to all the desktop apps (as the environment is starting up).
All of this is available already, for example I’m encrypting the files I sync to Dropbox and I mount the decrypted version to a dir on my desktop on startup. It’s not the entire home dir but you get the idea. It’s just gonna need some polish to become really smooth and user friendly.
Im most interested in encrypted homedirs for servers. Since all my collegues are to lazy to use encrypted ssh keys, i hoped that systemd-homed makes it possible to secure them from the root user.
Is systemd-homed already useable for such usecase? If gnome will do the same for desktops, that would be a big plus, thinking about firefox profiles and such. Hopefully also using pam or kerberos for decryption.
Number 2 is by design. Running as root is extremely dangerous, and passwordless sudo is not much better. You can, of course, allow sudo without a password by editing the /etc/sudoers file, but be concious of the security implications (any program you run would essentially have full access to everything, without you ever knowing).
I can’t figure out how to setup flatpak. Everything seems to be working fine until I enter the last line in the terminal:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Hard to help without logs or error messages. Maybe you could run the command with --verbose flag to see if it prints out something that might help?
I somehow set it up so that my username is not the super user, so I have to type a password in the terminal every time I want to use sudo. Is there a way to fix this without a clean install?
This is default behavior and probably shouldn't be changed. It's a good idea to set up your normal user without root privileges and it's a good idea to ask for authentication credentials whenever you need to elevate privileges.
I somehow set up the hard drive partitions so that the OS is on an encrypted partition, so I have to put in a password for the BIOS to boot up. Is there a way to fix this without a clean install?
Again, if you want encrypted disk, then this is actually good behavior, but in case you want to decrypt the disk without reinstall - it's possible, but not entirely simple or newbie friendly procedure, you need to know a bit about disk devices and mounting drives, for reference, see: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/60971/how-to-remove-luks-encryption
I’m used to a desktop interface with a toolbar/start menu that I can pin frequently-used programs to, but with Debian it seems like I need to click “Activities” to do anything. Is there a way to set up the interface so it’s more like Windows in that regard?
You can also tweak and change Gnome with addons and extensions to suit your needs - see https://extensions.gnome.org/
Is there any reason why I should stick with Debian? I’ve heard some people trashing Ubuntu but I’m not sure why. Is Debian better for older hardware?
The same linux kernel (in various versions) is running underneath all the distributions, so it's really just a matter of preference. Since you're new, hop around - try Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!, Fedora, Arch and everything else to see what you prefer.
hopefully they’ll design some package manager incompatible with android at the most basic level - and then double down when it’s proven to be a huge mistake. a good tick upwards for dev jobs, but the time for actual competition was over 10 years ago. this will fail miserably.
I hope they also look at Linux Mint and the Cinnamon desktop. It’s massively popular and that team work very hard. I’m sure they could use that support to help them focus on improving Cinnamon, the toolkit, accessibility etc.
Happy for Gnome though, they are a long standing project and used by many distro’s. I have used Gnome in the past and it’s decent, although a little heavy on RAM.
Would be great to see Debian also get this, being one of the oldest Linux distro’s and the basis for Ubuntu, which in turn has spawned many distros.
With a bit of modifying code to use the color picker and maybe rearranging the workflow to adapt to the new system, apps as advanced as DaVinci Resolve and LibreOffice can have permissions as restrictive as this (the network permission would of course may be needed but it would still be marked as Safe by Flathub).
You can use the file picker API to open the files or folders your app would need to access while having no filesystem permissions at all. You can access the camera, microphone, and GPS without the user devices portal, by simply using the respective portals where the user has the power to allow or deny access to such devices as they wish.
You can record the screen, take a screenshot, and pick a color in the screen by simply calling the proper portals, with the bonus that the user will be able to select if they want the entire screen, a specific window, or a specific area to be recorded/captured and whether the cursor should be shown or not.
Heck, even TeamViewer can be as this restricted without losing any functionality if they use the Screen Cast portal which allows apps to mirror input from a remote device! They would of course need the network permission, but that’s still safe.
Yes in the sense that the APIs were made because of flatpak, but not in the sense that devs would need to keep two separate code paths for flatpak vs non-flatpak - portals work everywhere.
My desktop would crash back to login screen after playing mass effect legendary edition. After exiting the game, if the desktop idle for a while, the moment the automatic screen off kick in, the CPU fan would whirl and if I wiggle the mouse, the desktop would immediately crash back to the login screen. Not sure whose fault it is, nvidia 545, EA, wayland or gnome.
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