N.E.P.T.R

My point exactly. A large attack surface means less secure. My point was that Kali isn’t focused on being a secure OS. It is all about the tools. Even without a vulnerability, a secure OS should protect against unknowns.

Ubuntu font. Idk why but I like it.

PCs aren’t secure. Linux default isnt secure. Kali has so many apps/tools installed by default that it isnt comparable to default Linux. It has massive attack surface and no security design, therefore calling it secure isn’t accurate.

If no effort was put into the security design of an OS, why call it secure?

Operating systems can function very different. When creating software (like video games) the developer has to understand or use software dependencies which interact with the OS in a number of specific (OS dependent) ways. Stuff like where is app/user data stored, how to connect to the internet, how to display stuff on the screen (2D), how to display complex 3D geometry on the screen fast (3D graphics acceleration), where the host OS stores shared libraries (and what kind of libraries can the software expect to always be available), what security restrictions the host OS has, what filesystem the host OS uses, how to access the keyboard and mouse, how to interact with the kernel (very important).

Since Windows and Linux are so very different, built for different purposes by different developers, it is impossible to take a Windows exe and run it on Linux.

These days, the WINE project, with help from Valve’s fork Proton, is able to run basically any Windows game on Linux with similar performance (if not better because Linux is lighter to run than Windows). It does this by creating a environment for the software/game that provides all of the OS stuff Windows software expects and translating it to Linux specific things.

TLDR: Linux is very different from Windows. Software meant for Windows won’t work natively on Linux (since everything is different). For Windows software to work on Linux, the WINE translates all the Linux specific OS stuff and creates an environment for the Windows software that feels like Windows. Most things work with WINE except exceedingly complex stuff, like browsers which have native Linux versions anyways.

Thanks for some updated context.

What do you mean secure by design? What part of it is secure. Compare it to actually security focused Linux operating systems like QubesOS, Kicksecure, or Secureblue. Literally any OS that supports the Brace tool (made by the creator of DivestOS) is much more secure than Kali Linux. Kali is purpose built for red team work, not being secure (aka reducing attack surface or designing around a threat model).

You mention “sane defaults”. That might mislead someone because it is ambiguous. The terminal defaults used to default to a root prompt, exemplifying that it isn’t a distro focused on sane defaults for a desktop distro.

Kali is a tool for a specific job. Its meant mostly for hacking or troubleshooting/analysis, being an OS for executing a collection CLI/TUI and GUI utils.

-Edited everything to make myself more intelligible.

It isn’t a secure operating system. It is a toolkit for pen testing and red team hackers. Definitely not a daily driver kind of OS.

For good out-of-the-box nvidia support, I recommend Bazzite.

Idk, but I just enable intelligent autohide.

For nvidia hardware, use nvidia images of Aurora/Bluefin (or Bazzite if you want gaming out of the box). All the OSes I mentioned are based on Fedora Atomic and offer image options for nvidia proprietary drivers. They even signing the kernel drivers, so you can use Secure Boot.

Really fun/interesting read.

Did you enter into a contract saying you must watch ads to use the service? Is ad blocking against ToS? I don’t think either are true, and a “click to consent” isn’t legally binding. Either way, I will never not block ads as it is important from a privacy and cyber security perspective.

Until a port to Wayland is made, I would avoid using this DE. X.Org is unmaintained legacy software. Maybe Sway would work as a replacement?

Yes, but Plasma doesnt protect against screen recording. The Devs expressed interest in protecting against arbitrary screen capture, still work in progress. See this issue: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/xdg-desktop-portal-kde/-/issues/7

Flatpak is installed on basically every Linux distribution. Literally all I do to install Steam is go to the Software Center and search “steam” and click install. It takes 2 clicks.

Cinnamon with Wayland is still in testing. X11/X.Org is unmaintained software and is less secure than Wayland. GNOME is the only desktop at the moment that actually protects the screen from arbitrary recording by applications. Just food for thought.

I don’t like Snaps either, but it isn’t a that big of a deal. Ubuntu is still vastly more private than Windows. I do prefer Fedora much more because it actually sandboxes system services with SELinux polices. Snap creates a better sandbox for applications than Flatpak, but it is slower to launch applications, depends on AppArmor (which is less secure than SELinux), and uses hard coded package repo (centralized design).

On Linux, you can install Steam inside a sandbox for better security. Easy to do with either Flatpak or Bubblejail. This makes it so that Steam does not have full file system access.

Disabling unnecessary background services, disabling telemetry, removing preinstalled adware. Easy to do with WinUtil by Chris Titus Tech.