Magiilaro

Unreal Tournament 2004 depends on SDL 1.3 when I recall correctly, and SDL is neither on Linux nor on any other OS a core system library.

Binary only programs are foreign to Linux, so yes you will get issues with integrating them. Linux works best when everyone plays by the same rules and for Linux that means sources available.

Linux in its core is highly modifiable, besides the Kernel (and nowadays maybe systemd), there is no core system that could be used to define a API against. Linux on a Home theater PC has a different system then Linux on a Server then Linux on a gaming PC then Linux on a smartphone.

You can boot the Kernel and a tiny shell as init and have a valid, but very limited, Linux system.

Linux has its own set of rules and his own way to do things and trying to force it to be something else can not and will not work.

It works under Windows because the windows binaries come with all their dependency .dll (and/or they need some ancient visual runtime installed).

This is more or less the Flatpack way, with bundling all dependencies into the package

Just use Linux the Linux way and install your program via the package manager (including Flatpack) and let that handle the dependencies.

I run Linux for over 25 years now and had maybe a handful cases where the Userland did break and that was because I didn’t followed what I was told during package upgrade.

The amount of time that I had to get out of .dll-hell on Windows on the other hand. The Linux way is better and way more stable.

LXQT or KDE I just like the QT look and feel.

GNOME is great in general but not for me, it is too much MacOS alike and too limited for my liking.

If you want to take that from my text then feel free.

Tinkering, in my personal definition, would mean installing third party repositories for the package manager (or something like the AUR on Arch) or performing configuration changes on the system level… Just keep away as most as possible from accessing the root user (including su/sudo) is a general a good advice I would say.

My Arch Linux setup on my desktop and my servers are low-maintenance. I do updates on my servers every month or so (unless some security issue was announced, that will be patched right away) and my desktop a few times a week.

Nearly anything can be low-maintenance with the proper care and consideration.

For your constraints I would use just use Debian, Alma Linux or Linux Mint and stick with the official packages, flathub and default configuration on the system level. Those are low-maintenance out of the box in general.

Yeah, that’s why I am against Microsoft Keys on my systems

I fail to see the positive side of that…

Loading BPF code from user space is, I hope, only possible with root access to the system. That would mean that an attacker needs root access to exploit BPF, but if an attacker has root access what stops him/her to do anything they want? At this time the system is lost anyway.

Or am I missing anything?

Yes I can. But I am a Linux system administrator with 20 years of experience. This should not be the level of measurement for stuff like this. 😉

What I meant was: Don’t put a Microsoft master trusted authority in the Kernel, unless one chooses to install a Microsoft distribution. And don’t go the SSL/TLS way with the huge number of default authorities that get installed on every system. It would be a pain to be forced to always build my own Kernel again just to keep Microsoft or any other institution/company that I find untrustworthy out of it.

I hope we will learn from the SecureBoot debacle and not give Microsoft the primary signing keys and infrastructure for this again.

Making errors and analysing them to figure out what went wrong and why is a huge part of learning. You can only learn so much from theory, some things can be learned best by trial and error and the experience gained from it.

When I started with Linux I did choose to use Gentoo Linux because it was the most complex and complicated option, so I had the most opportunities to learn something by ducking up!

My one year old Dell Latitude with a fast SSD needs about 8 minutes every morning to boot windows and start all that security crap that company IT has put on there.