Last week I had a brief look at secureblue, a hardened Linux distribution based on a so-called “atomic” Fedora distribution (called “silverblue” in case you’re interested). I was interested because I’ve read about it on several security-related websites like for instance here or here.
And I liked it a lot, becauise it takes many very good ideas from GrapheneOS, like their hardened Chromium-based browser Vanadium which here is called Trivalent. Even their webpages kind of look alike.
And since I haven’t had a look at a tiling window manager yet, I first tried the “Sway” version. With the <super> and <Enter> keys, you open a terminal window, here called “foot”. Looks like this:
You’ll notice the “us” keyboard, which I couldn’t switch to a German one, except in the login manager which looks like this:
This isn’t a problem of Sway; I later tried that with another distribution where it worked. Maybe some overlay “header” on Fedora’s version was responsible for this, I didn’t find out during my test.
I stopped testing it because neither this Sway nor the KDE Plasma or Gnome based versions of secureblue ran on Mitchie’s old Lenovo laptop which still has a Celeron-class dual core CPU, and only 2GB of RAM. Too heavy for old metal like that. I also can’t do all of my stuff (like music making which requires real time) on such an atomic version of Linux, and with flatpaks.
But in case you want a nice and reasonable secure machine, and have the hardware for it – I recommend a quad core with at least 4GB of RAM – then go for it, and have a look. Could be well worth trying it.
And like always, thanks for reading.