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> I do most of my coding in a VM now Perhaps you may be interested in Qubes OS, where you do everything in VMs with a nice UX. My daily driver, can't recommend

> I do most of my coding in a VM now Perhaps you may be interested in Qubes OS, where you do everything in VMs with a nice UX. My daily driver, can't recommend it enough.

mikepurvis 1y ago
How does it avoid the sharing headaches that make the ergonomics of snaps so bad?
- fsflover 1y ago
  I never used snaps, so I don't understand what you mean here. Here's a couple of typical Qubes usage patterns: https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2022/10/28/how-to-organize-your-qubes/ https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2022/10/28/how-to-organize-you..., https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/03/13/partitioning-my-digital-life-into.html https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/03/13/partitioning-my-...
  - mikepurvis 1y ago
    One of the biggest ones is around access to the home directory, ~/.whatever, that kind of thing. Like a browser downloads something, a text editor opens it, it gets run from the terminal and creates a new executable, that new executable is run and mutates something else that the text editor also had open, etc etc. If all the apps have access to ~ then it's https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/ and there's basically no point in the isolation, but if they each have their own ~ then sharing files between apps is a user-hostile headache. From that article, it looks like perhaps the difference is that snaps are isolated at the app level, whereas qubes is a layer down, where each qube is a kind of workspace with multiple apps potentially installed in it. That seems reasonable enough, though you do have to be willing to pay the disk and mental overhead cost associated with setting up the same tools multiple times, or maintain playbooks/whatever to automate that, or am I going to figure out how to get my one VSCode instance access to the different isolated environments where I need an editor, and if I do that have I basically compromised the whole system model.
    - orblivion 1y ago
      The "Admin" of QubesOS (dom0) is in its own VM, and it doesn't have Internet access. Nothing you download from a browser in another VM can touch dom0 without a VM break. Each VM has its own file system. Even if you wanted to copy a downloaded file to dom0, Qubes makes you jump through hoops to do it.
    - orblivion 1y ago
      As for setting things up multiple times - you can install stuff in the "Template VM" which is where the OS goes. Every "App VM" mostly just has files in their own ~/. Any changes an App VM makes to its system files won't affect other VMs, or even survive a restart. There are "playbooks" with Salt but I never figured that stuff out. If you pass around some setup scripts instead, that's an attack vector, but I don't think drive-by attacks like the OP would target something sophisticated like that yet.
orblivion 1y ago
Yeah I use Qubes for my "serious" computing these days. It comes with performance headaches, though my laptop isn't the best. I wonder about something like https://secureblue.dev/ https://secureblue.dev/ though. I'm not comfortable with Fedora and last I heard it wasn't out of Beta or whatever yet. But it uses containers rather than VMs. I'm not a targeted person so I may be happy to have "good enough" security for some performance back.
- secureblue 1y ago
  secureblue creator here :) some corrections: > last I heard it wasn't out of Beta or whatever yet It is > But it uses containers rather than VMs It doesn't use plain containers for app isolation. We ship the OS itself as a bootable container (https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc). That doesn't mean we use or recommend using containers for application isolation. Container support is actually disabled by default via our selinux policy restricting userns usage (this can be toggled though, of course). Containers on their own don't provide sandboxing. The syscall filtering for them is extremely weak. Flatpak (which sandboxes via bubblewrap: https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap) can be configured to be reasonably good, but we still encourage the use of VMs if needed. We provide one-click tooling for easily installing virt-manager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virt-manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virt-manager) if desired. In short though, secureblue and Qubes aren't really analogous. We have different goals and target use cases. There is even an open issue on Qubes to add a template to use secureblue as a guest: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/9755 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/9755
  - orblivion 1y ago
    I keep hearing different things about how well containers can isolate. I guess the "on their own" caveat is the important one. I don't really know how they work. Hearing not to rely on it from the developer of secureblue is pretty strong case. Thanks.

> I do most of my coding in a VM now Perhaps you may be interested in Qubes OS, where you do everything in VMs with a nice UX. My daily driver, can't recommend it enough.

mikepurvis 1y ago

How does it avoid the sharing headaches that make the ergonomics of snaps so bad?

fsflover 1y ago
I never used snaps, so I don't understand what you mean here. Here's a couple of typical Qubes usage patterns: https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2022/10/28/how-to-organize-your-qubes/ https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2022/10/28/how-to-organize-you..., https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/03/13/partitioning-my-digital-life-into.html https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/03/13/partitioning-my-...
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  One of the biggest ones is around access to the home directory, ~/.whatever, that kind of thing. Like a browser downloads something, a text editor opens it, it gets run from the terminal and creates a new executable, that new executable is run and mutates something else that the text editor also had open, etc etc. If all the apps have access to ~ then it's https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/ and there's basically no point in the isolation, but if they each have their own ~ then sharing files between apps is a user-hostile headache. From that article, it looks like perhaps the difference is that snaps are isolated at the app level, whereas qubes is a layer down, where each qube is a kind of workspace with multiple apps potentially installed in it. That seems reasonable enough, though you do have to be willing to pay the disk and mental overhead cost associated with setting up the same tools multiple times, or maintain playbooks/whatever to automate that, or am I going to figure out how to get my one VSCode instance access to the different isolated environments where I need an editor, and if I do that have I basically compromised the whole system model.
  - orblivion 1y ago
    The "Admin" of QubesOS (dom0) is in its own VM, and it doesn't have Internet access. Nothing you download from a browser in another VM can touch dom0 without a VM break. Each VM has its own file system. Even if you wanted to copy a downloaded file to dom0, Qubes makes you jump through hoops to do it.
  - orblivion 1y ago
    As for setting things up multiple times - you can install stuff in the "Template VM" which is where the OS goes. Every "App VM" mostly just has files in their own ~/. Any changes an App VM makes to its system files won't affect other VMs, or even survive a restart. There are "playbooks" with Salt but I never figured that stuff out. If you pass around some setup scripts instead, that's an attack vector, but I don't think drive-by attacks like the OP would target something sophisticated like that yet.

orblivion 1y ago

Yeah I use Qubes for my "serious" computing these days. It comes with performance headaches, though my laptop isn't the best. I wonder about something like https://secureblue.dev/ https://secureblue.dev/ though. I'm not comfortable with Fedora and last I heard it wasn't out of Beta or whatever yet. But it uses containers rather than VMs. I'm not a targeted person so I may be happy to have "good enough" security for some performance back.

secureblue 1y ago
secureblue creator here :) some corrections: > last I heard it wasn't out of Beta or whatever yet It is > But it uses containers rather than VMs It doesn't use plain containers for app isolation. We ship the OS itself as a bootable container (https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc). That doesn't mean we use or recommend using containers for application isolation. Container support is actually disabled by default via our selinux policy restricting userns usage (this can be toggled though, of course). Containers on their own don't provide sandboxing. The syscall filtering for them is extremely weak. Flatpak (which sandboxes via bubblewrap: https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap) can be configured to be reasonably good, but we still encourage the use of VMs if needed. We provide one-click tooling for easily installing virt-manager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virt-manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virt-manager) if desired. In short though, secureblue and Qubes aren't really analogous. We have different goals and target use cases. There is even an open issue on Qubes to add a template to use secureblue as a guest: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/9755 https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/9755
- orblivion 1y ago
  I keep hearing different things about how well containers can isolate. I guess the "on their own" caveat is the important one. I don't really know how they work. Hearing not to rely on it from the developer of secureblue is pretty strong case. Thanks.