Greetings and Salutations

Hello. It’s been a long time, again. But no total website overhaul this time; I just happened to find the old ThinkPad, which contained the mSATA drive (which I have no adapter for), which was the only place I had my website, so this one is going to stay.

I am glad I migrated (back) to Hugo before I left, because that makes my job now easy. Just write a new blog post in Markdown, deploy, and sync.

I am working on a new project, trying to find the most secure desktop operating system. I still haven’t defined what criteria I will be using for “secure” and “desktop”, but I’m thinking something along the lines of the following:

Secure:

I have been told by somebody in the know, that planning security varies depending on your threat model (that meaning what kind of threats/opposition you expect to go against). So what kind of threat model should I have?

There are two kinds of vulnerability that I want to focus on: remote “holes” (as the OpenBSD website puts it), and physical access to the machine.

Additionally, I am a fairly advanced computer user; so I want to distinguish between what is default, easily available, and accessible for someone like me.

I will also, for this category, take into account CVEs; these are not a perfect metric, but the relative prevalence of severities does have value.

Desktop:

This one, I have received a good number of guidelines for from Lunduke’s Locals:

  • not be headless/have a GUI (Dirt2901)
  • games as a plus (Dirt2901)
  • primary purpose is single-human-computer interaction (Greg_Gauthier)
  • not intended form factor of phones, tablets, and “convertibles” (Greg_Gauthier)

I think these criteria alone will be enough for a simple analysis, but I would argue we can go deeper. For example, OpenBSD comes with a graphical interface: twm (Tom’s Window Manager), with a very small number of utilities. Also, it does come with games, but only terminal games as far as I can tell. So I think these will have to be on something of a scale.

I also want to update a little more regularly. We’ll see whether or not that actually happens though.


2022-07-20