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Are there any good Linux desktop communities y’all recommend joining? I want to setup a passwordless workflow with a Linux desktop environment, but I’m honestl

by xyst 2y ago

Are there any good Linux desktop communities y’all recommend joining? I want to setup a passwordless workflow with a Linux desktop environment, but I’m honestly lost between “Wayland” vs “wlroots” vs “X”. I only understand that Wayland is the preferred “display server” and “X” only exists for legacy. And this is only the display server. I have not even delved into the other components. Right now, I have setup a basic desktop environment. Boot up VM or PC -> presented with a terminal to ”login” -> input user -> input password -> load basic terminal (i guess this is called a “tty” (?) -> type command to load desktop environment -> do stuff What I am looking for is: Register yubikey with user and password as fallback. Reboot PC and leave yubikey connected. As PC boots up, it will automatically see yubikey corresponds to user on machine, and proceeds to load in desktop environment. No more manual process as described above. Can “do stuff” much faster. Can even use the yubikey for subsequent operations in user space (ie, sudo authentication). Would be cool to have a security feature that will lock the session if it has been removed; or have ability to fallback to manual password entry (in case hw auth is broken). I have been able to do this in macOS to a certain degree of success with TouchID. But every time I update the machine, Apple update process resets the pam modules.

nine_k 2y ago
PAM was invented for scenarios like that. AFAICT logind uses PAM no matter what graphics server are you running. So this likely works under Wayland and X equally, provided the right yubikey: https://adl1995.github.io/passwordless-logins-with-yubikey.html https://adl1995.github.io/passwordless-logins-with-yubikey.h...
- xyst 2y ago
  Oh thanks for sharing, this seems promising. I’ll look into this.
porphyra 2y ago
fyi wlroots is an implementation of Wayland.
roenxi 2y ago
> Are there any good Linux desktop communities y’all recommend joining? I don't know of any (phoronix.com, maybe? it slants more towards hardware enthusiasts than desktops so probably not, but it tends to be interested in things like drivers), and I'd be surprised if they existed for the interesting parts of the graphics stack. In the old times (2010) X was the only option and it handled display. There has been a huge push since AMD got serious about open source graphics to redesign the graphics subsystem to be more linux-y by transforming it into something a bit more like a Jenga tower of components stapled together (wayland is one of them) that coordinate to replace X. The coordinating body seems to be freedesktop.org but it takes a lot of investigating to figure out what it is they are doing at any given time. It happens very slowly though so knowledge picked up can stay current for a decade or more. The new component based world has a couple of key nodes where the work happens - the kernel (DRM subsystem specifically) for drivers, freedesktop.org for technical compatibility coordination, mesa3d.org for the heavy lifting libraries, Red Hat for pipewire that picks up the slack that Wayland fumbled, then the morass of compositers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_display_servers#Wayland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_display_servers#Waylan...) that are the user-facing part and where most people will interact with all this. They all have their own communities but IMO it is unclear which will take the lead outside the majors like KDE and Gnome. swaywm so far but I don't think it has a community anywhere as such.
bramhaag 2y ago
The Arch wiki is really good for things like this, and is hardly Arch specific (other than package names). Searching "YubiKey" brings me here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/YubiKey#Linux_user_authentication_with_PAM https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/YubiKey#Linux_user_authenti.... It seems to describe your exact use case. Of course it has a lot of info about Wayland vs. X too, etc.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> but I’m honestly lost between “Wayland” vs “wlroots” vs “X”. I only understand that Wayland is the preferred “display server” and “X” only exists for legacy. A minor clarification: Wayland is a protocol, not an implementation. X11 is also theoretically a protocol, but the only implementation anyone seems to care about is the Xorg server. Because a lot of compositors (the wayland-world piece of software that actually implements the display server) need similar core functionality, wlroots was created as a library that provides a lot of the needed code and which gets used by the actual compositor (ex. mutter for GNOME, kwin for KDE, and sway for sway).

by xyst 2y ago

nine_k 2y ago

PAM was invented for scenarios like that. AFAICT logind uses PAM no matter what graphics server are you running. So this likely works under Wayland and X equally, provided the right yubikey: https://adl1995.github.io/passwordless-logins-with-yubikey.html https://adl1995.github.io/passwordless-logins-with-yubikey.h...

xyst 2y ago
Oh thanks for sharing, this seems promising. I’ll look into this.

porphyra 2y ago

fyi wlroots is an implementation of Wayland.

roenxi 2y ago

> Are there any good Linux desktop communities y’all recommend joining? I don't know of any (phoronix.com, maybe? it slants more towards hardware enthusiasts than desktops so probably not, but it tends to be interested in things like drivers), and I'd be surprised if they existed for the interesting parts of the graphics stack. In the old times (2010) X was the only option and it handled display. There has been a huge push since AMD got serious about open source graphics to redesign the graphics subsystem to be more linux-y by transforming it into something a bit more like a Jenga tower of components stapled together (wayland is one of them) that coordinate to replace X. The coordinating body seems to be freedesktop.org but it takes a lot of investigating to figure out what it is they are doing at any given time. It happens very slowly though so knowledge picked up can stay current for a decade or more. The new component based world has a couple of key nodes where the work happens - the kernel (DRM subsystem specifically) for drivers, freedesktop.org for technical compatibility coordination, mesa3d.org for the heavy lifting libraries, Red Hat for pipewire that picks up the slack that Wayland fumbled, then the morass of compositers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_display_servers#Wayland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_display_servers#Waylan...) that are the user-facing part and where most people will interact with all this. They all have their own communities but IMO it is unclear which will take the lead outside the majors like KDE and Gnome. swaywm so far but I don't think it has a community anywhere as such.

bramhaag 2y ago

The Arch wiki is really good for things like this, and is hardly Arch specific (other than package names). Searching "YubiKey" brings me here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/YubiKey#Linux_user_authentication_with_PAM https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/YubiKey#Linux_user_authenti.... It seems to describe your exact use case. Of course it has a lot of info about Wayland vs. X too, etc.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

> but I’m honestly lost between “Wayland” vs “wlroots” vs “X”. I only understand that Wayland is the preferred “display server” and “X” only exists for legacy. A minor clarification: Wayland is a protocol, not an implementation. X11 is also theoretically a protocol, but the only implementation anyone seems to care about is the Xorg server. Because a lot of compositors (the wayland-world piece of software that actually implements the display server) need similar core functionality, wlroots was created as a library that provides a lot of the needed code and which gets used by the actual compositor (ex. mutter for GNOME, kwin for KDE, and sway for sway).