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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

#51

Post by cycloptic »

MisterTea wrote: post #27
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…

Both. glibc... No. And without boring you with anecdote I can sum it up by saying: Linux DE's feel like cheap Windows XP or OSX knockoffs. What's worse is every DE and their forks have their own duplicate DE companion programs such as explorer and notepad clones. I liken them to a Potemkin village; well polished but once you start looking behind things...

If your complaint is that you dislike clones of Windows and Mac, then the combination of tiling window manager, shell, tmux, and vim/emacs is usable and provides an experience that is completely different from those other operating systems. That didn't go away on Linux. There is also plan9port too.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#52

Post by darkwater »

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 don't want ads in my application menu, sorry. Good for you if you like them.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#53

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

bitwize wrote: post #49
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really unrelated? I dunno, maybe my distaste for certain development styles is leading me to see things that aren't there, but I fell like the Linux Desktop hacked-together "it's good enough for me" way of doing things is creeping into paid OSs like Mac and Windows.

"The desktop" is suffering from the same complexity breakdown that AAA gaming suffers from. It's hard -- and getting harder -- to produce a cohesive properly developed and QA'd AAA game because gamers now expect something way beyond the capabilities of a surgical team of 10-50 people. To even ship a AAA title requires a team of hundreds and a budget of tens to hundreds of millions. and when you're dealing with an wnd…

> Desktop environments are now reaching that threshold because users demand "modernity" and fanciness.

Do they? Do they really? Because I struggle to think of a change made in how I or anyone I know's desktop works that we actually think made things better. The last one I can think of was when Windows added start-typing-search to the start menu back in, what, 7?

I'm not dismissing that other people might be demanding some "modern"/"fancy" features, but if so what the heck are they? What I see is GUI redesign for the sake of it, or hiding of options in order to promote more "desired" (by the vendor) options.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#54

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

cycloptic wrote: post #40
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd rather just use software that isn't so inept or controlling as to hardcode values in the first place. Probably why I don't use GNOME.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#55

Post by Jasper_ »

cycloptic wrote: post #36

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 k…

There is no way to fix it. Also, X11 has several ways of writing keyloggers to get around input locks. I've written one here https://github.com/magcius/keylog

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#56

Post by cycloptic »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #54
cycloptic wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd rather just use software that isn't so inept or controlling as to hardcode values in the first place. Probably why I don't use GNOME.

All software has to hardcode something at some point, this is unavoidable. I don't use GNOME either, but they do make it very easy for newcomers to contribute and to change anything they want. It's open source after all, the control is in the hands of the user.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#57

Post by jjoonathan »

stabbles wrote: post #23
jjoonathan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* The lock screen pops up, requests a password, and disappears after you enter it, but you find that your password and enter key also made their way into the foreground text field. I love linux, but it's not wart-free.

Did that really happen to you or are you confusing it with this issue on MacOS? https://twitter.com/BenoitLetondor/status/939127296266588160

It really happened, just last week. Although I use MacOS regularly, this was the first time I had ever seen it happen, and it startled me.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#58

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

cycloptic wrote: post #56
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather just use software that isn't so inept or controlling as to hardcode values in the first place. Probably why I don't use GNOME.

All software has to hardcode something at some point, this is unavoidable. I don't use GNOME either, but they do make it very easy for newcomers to contribute and to change anything they want. It's open source after all, the control is in the hands of the user.

> It's open source after all, the control is in the hands of the user.

That's true of proprietary software to roughly the same extent: if I don't like how things are I am free to make my own or just not use it.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#59

Post by simion314 »

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.

I know, but for me accessibility tools are a must, if needed I will compile, use wine or write my own because i need them. But from my experience (with KDE at least) you can customize every keyboard shortcut with a GUI and I could submit patches for issues I found and fixed. If you use a distribution like Debian or ubuntu then installing the required development libraries and rebuilding a package is simple enough in most cases.

I understand why compiling sucks though and this is why I am considering to use Python for a program I want to make and open source despite the fact I dislike it's syntax.

Re: X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

#60

Post by cycloptic »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #58
cycloptic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All software has to hardcode something at some point, this is unavoidable. I don't use GNOME either, but they do make it very easy for newcomers to contribute and to change anything they want. It's open source after all, the control is in the hands of the user.

> It's open source after all, the control is in the hands of the user. That's true of proprietary software to roughly the same extent: if I don't like how things are I am free to make my own or just not use it.

I don't follow. In my experience setting up a build environment and changing a couple lines of code provides a lot more control (and is a lot easier) than rewriting the whole thing from scratch or ditching it entirely for something else. If your distro's package manager supports source builds then you probably don't even need to use tools like GNOME Builder to make quick modifications.
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