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FuckBigTech347

@FuckBigTech347@lemmygrad.ml

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Is it actually dangerous to run Firefox as root?

I have a few Linux servers at home that I regularly remote into in order to manage, usually logged into KDE Plasma as root. Usually they just have several command line windows and a file manager open (I personally just find it more convenient to use the command line from a remote desktop instead of directly SSH-ing into the...

FuckBigTech347, (edited )
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Firefox does sandbox everything but vulnerabilities exist and sometimes go unnoticed for a while before they’re discovered and patched. If a malicious script does manage to escape the sandbox it will be able to do literally anything to the system since it has root privileges. It would have full access to any device that’s in /dev, it could create, modify and delete udev or iptables rules, it could mess with the BIOS since the kernel exposes EFI variables, if the mainboard has re-writable flash chips for the firmware it could write malicious code to them since they may show up in /dev, etc. If any of this makes you uneasy then you probably should stop running stuff as root in general except for when you really need to.

Also in general you don’t want to run any graphical applications on a Server unless there is a very specific reason for it because it takes up extra resources and therefore makes the machine use more power overall. This is especially bad when the machine in question has no hardware acceleration and renders everything in software. Remote desktop also adds CPU/GPU load and takes up a good bit of I/O and network bandwidth which is not ideal for a NAS server.

FuckBigTech347,
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lact

Wayland-Proxy Load Balancer Helping Firefox Cope With Wayland Issues (www.phoronix.com)

Among the Firefox Wayland bugs, one of the top crash bugs is over a lost connection to a Wayland compositor. For dealing with it is to have a proxy between Firefox and the Wayland compositor to cache messages and prevent compositor message queue overflows.

FuckBigTech347,
@FuckBigTech347@lemmygrad.ml avatar

I agree. The proxy solution they’re proposing seems like a band-aid on a fundamental design issue to me. It’s easier to just tack yet another library onto a big project than to refactor large amounts of code. This is exactly why a lot of software is getting more and more shit.

FuckBigTech347,
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From what I understand it’s basically like a “thin client” type of thing where the client loads the Kernel from local storage up to a certain point and then boots into a rootfs that is somewhere else on a remote server.

FuckBigTech347,
@FuckBigTech347@lemmygrad.ml avatar

Similar but in this case the Linux Kernel/Init System act as the PXE firmware so you don’t need a TFTP Server to load initramfs and a Kernel image. And you don’t need a NFS or Samba server because the Server has the drive with the rootfs already exposed to the network.

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