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X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

leahneukirchen.org

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Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#31

Post by catblast »

speedgoose wrote: post #14
kstenerud wrote: post #2

My experiences with screen locking on Linux over time, using various machines: * The screen doesn't lock, and remains on while the lid is closed. * The screen doesn't lock, but does turn off when the lid is closed. * The screen locks, but the machine doesn't suspend when the lid is closed. * The screen doesn't turn on after the lid is opened. Key commands work, though. * The screen turns on after the lid is opened, b…

Yes, sadly I think the best GNU/Linux for laptops is Windows 10 with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). By far.

I think you may have had something, and then oversold it.

The only thing “by far” about Windows 10 is the distance it should be defenestrated.

In other news... look up Surface Pro “hot bag”. The chucklefucks at Microsoft couldn’t get reliable suspend working on their own hardware for years.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#32

Post by rauhl »

MisterTea wrote: post #5
kstenerud wrote: post #2

My experiences with screen locking on Linux over time, using various machines: * The screen doesn't lock, and remains on while the lid is closed. * The screen doesn't lock, but does turn off when the lid is closed. * The screen locks, but the machine doesn't suspend when the lid is closed. * The screen doesn't turn on after the lid is opened. Key commands work, though. * The screen turns on after the lid is opened, b…

Most of what you describe isn't the screen lock but sounds more like something isn't communicating system events properly. That or bad hardware with poor open source driver vendor support. Also, this is why I don't use Linux any more. It's grown into a dumpster fire of ad-hoc patches from big corps looking to hammer every last drop of cloud server performance or poorly designed desktops made by people who obviously d…

> Plan 9 front is my daily driver

If emacs, SBCL & Firefox ran on Plan 9, I would see no reason to bother running Linux on hardware. But they don’t, and they probably never will.

Maybe when I retire I’ll have time to work on porting them, but I have a long time until then!

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#33

Post by tryauuum »

speedgoose wrote: post #14
kstenerud wrote: post #2

My experiences with screen locking on Linux over time, using various machines: * The screen doesn't lock, and remains on while the lid is closed. * The screen doesn't lock, but does turn off when the lid is closed. * The screen locks, but the machine doesn't suspend when the lid is closed. * The screen doesn't turn on after the lid is opened. Key commands work, though. * The screen turns on after the lid is opened, b…

Yes, sadly I think the best GNU/Linux for laptops is Windows 10 with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). By far.

I can't stop hating Microsoft for WSL. Yes, it is a way forward for the company but I still have a feeling they have found a perfect way to make younger generation ignore Linux completely.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#34

Post by catblast »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #22
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's imperfect and irritating in many ways. Many other actually (BT, Wifi, battery life, they all have their problems). But your alternative is one totally locked on ecosystem and one provided with embedded spywares. It's good enough, and since we are not giving millions of dollars to the editors like we do with products disrespecting us, I understand we can't ask for perfection.

> It's good enough I've been hearing that for between 15 and 20 years now. I believe this mentality is part of the reason it never seems to get any better.

> I believe this mentality is part of the reason it never seems to get any better.

Or maybe it’s that authoring and supporting drivers for actual hardware is tremendous effort that is mostly thankless.

Even Microsoft can’t get something much better and they literally have billions they need to throw at it.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#35

Post by fanatic2pope »

kstenerud wrote: post #2

My experiences with screen locking on Linux over time, using various machines: * The screen doesn't lock, and remains on while the lid is closed. * The screen doesn't lock, but does turn off when the lid is closed. * The screen locks, but the machine doesn't suspend when the lid is closed. * The screen doesn't turn on after the lid is opened. Key commands work, though. * The screen turns on after the lid is opened, b…

My own experience using various laptops (mostly thinkpads, but also a couple of asus and one dell) over the last 10 or so years under Fedora has been pretty consistently good. There was a period between Fedora 28 and 30 when it took 10 seconds to un-suspend (instead of it being instant) but that is fixed again in Fedora 31.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#36

Post by cycloptic »

These are good suggestions, but it seems that xsecurelock still can't provide a workaround for the bug where the screen doesn't lock if a popup menu happens to be open or the pointer is grabbed in any other way [0]. I couldn't find any good way to fix this and the only suggested workaround seems to be to switch to Wayland. I've switched on all of my machines (for this and for other reasons) but please make sure you know the details of this if you still use Xorg.

[0] https://github.com/google/xsecurelock#known-security-issues

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#37

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

catblast wrote: post #34
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's good enough I've been hearing that for between 15 and 20 years now. I believe this mentality is part of the reason it never seems to get any better.

> I believe this mentality is part of the reason it never seems to get any better. Or maybe it’s that authoring and supporting drivers for actual hardware is tremendous effort that is mostly thankless. Even Microsoft can’t get something much better and they literally have billions they need to throw at it.

> Or maybe it’s that authoring and supporting drivers for actual hardware is tremendous effort that is mostly thankless.

Oh, if only drivers were the only part of Linux Desktop that was broken...

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#39

Post by danharaj »

ubercow13 wrote: post #15

I prefer https://github.com/muennich/physlock It seems more secure as it bypasses X, and you can be sure (can you? I just assume this, I don't really know) your input is not even being passed to X when your screen is locked. In practice I've found it very reliable.

This is what I use as well, I have a hotkey to invoke it and lock my screen reflexively when I leave my computer.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#40

Post by cycloptic »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #20
simion314 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or poorly designed desktops made by people who obviously don't use them. Do you mean the design part or the coding part? From my limited experience desktops are made by contributors and volunteers work on whatever affects them the most or some might work on cool stuff. It is what it is, without someone with money hiring a large dev team and foucssing on user tickets it will never change. As a developer I prefer som…

Being able to recompile from source to change hardcoded values isn't actually any better in my opinion. Especially given how much of a pain it can be to get a build environment set up for many projects.

You might want to look at something like GNOME Builder, which is designed to make it easy to contribute to existing projects and will clone the project and setup the build environment for you.
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