Images

Table of Contents

• Security recommendation
• Desktop
  • Stable
  • Experimental
• Server

Security recommendation

GNOME and Sway (Silverblue and Sericea images, respectively) secure privileged Wayland protocols like screencopy. This means that on environments outside of GNOME and Sway, applications can access screen content of the entire desktop. This implicitly includes the content of other applications. It's primarily for this reason that Silverblue and Sericea images are recommended. A commit submitted by secureblue to fix this in KDE is scheduled to land in Plasma 6.4 (discussion, PR). Cosmic has plans to fix this.

In addition, GNOME also provides weak thumbnailer sandboxing in Gnome Files, which is an effort to mitigate attacks via thumbnailers. No environment aside from GNOME provides any thumbnailer sandboxing.

It should also be noted that our Sericea images disable the wlroots desktop portal, despite it being commonly used alongside Sway. This is because the portal reintroduces the screencopy vulnerability described above, which would undermine the security improvements in Sway for sandboxed applications. The downside of this is that by default on our Sericea images, flatpaks and applications that haven’t implemented protocol support (like chromium-based browsers) are entirely prevented from screenshotting and screensharing. If necessary, Sway users can configure this using their own portals.conf.

This section is a relative recommendation between the desktop environments available on secureblue. GNOME and Sway have some extra security niceties like the ones listed above. However, this should not be misconstrued as saying that either one solves any of the fundamental issues with desktop Linux security. For more details, consult the table below.

Desktop

nvidia-open images are recommended for systems with NVIDIA GPUs Turing or newer. These include the new open kernel modules from NVIDIA, not Nouveau.
nvidia images are recommended for systems with NVIDIA GPUs Pascal or older. These include the closed kernel modules from NVIDIA.

Stable

Silverblue (GNOME)

Kinoite (KDE Plasma)

Sericea (Sway)

Experimental

COSMIC

Server