The Universal blue project checks some of these boxes I think. It’s a toolset for rolling your own immutable images based distros like Fedora Silverblue and Bazzite.
Check out Secureblue, I am using that currently. Just firefox doesnt work, I hope that gets fixed by the Fedora Devs (and then it needs to either be not installed by ublue or not removed by secureblue, as installing a removed package doesnt work poorly)
Apart from that at least the things I mentioned are all not ticket.
We (ublue) remove Firefox and install the flatpak because you want your browser to update when it needs to update, and not only when your OS image updates.
Browsers need usernamespaces to isolate Tabs from another. At least thats how Chromium does it, and I think Firefox does too.
Flatpak Chromium browsers are very experimental, Zypak is a thing and it sounds nice, spawning a seperate flatpak process instead. But its probably less secure than what is officially supported.
This is why there is no official Flatpak Chromium Browser, Vivaldi actively decided against because of that thing. The Chromium Flatpak does something better, but this was (at least some time ago) not done in other Flatpak Chromium Derivates.
Firefox is supposedly more compatible with the restrictions of Flatpak as it doesnt use user namespaces, but there also is no statement on how they do it, how it can be equally secure etc.
Browser can be best ran in Bubblejail, allowing user namespaces but the rest being blocked just as in Flatpak. The issue is simply that the bubblewrap in Flatpak uses a single seccomp filter, while just Browsers should be allowed to spawn user namespaces.
I am not sure about Distrobox, the Apps are spawned in a seperate user namespace but I suppose they can still use user namespaces anyways. But this is unnecessary overhead without any reason. One could isolate the Distrobox from the system, but portals dont cover that afaik.
So it stays a no. I think if the main image would not include Firefox, projects like Secureblue wouldnt need to actively remove Firefox so users could still layer it regularly. The problem is with having it included and downstream Distros removing it via an override.
I disagree with the premise that Android is Linux “fixed”. Sudo is a bridge for privilege compartmentalization. There is root on Android.
And for many of those points there is a solution, but not one many want to use. SELinux is poorly document and has a bad reputation, but does work. File systems can be mounted as to not execute anything on them.
Good topic idea though, I just disagree with the specific examples.
I’m not sure what you mean about without sudo - if there’s a root account logging over isn’t more secure than SU or SUDO. At some point you trust someone with root access either by ssh key, password or sudo abilities.
Openbsd har a rather stellar security history, but there’s still root.
Also there’s still root on Android, so I don’t agree with your point of “Android fixed Linux”. You don’t need to elevate to install software, but the software you install can elevate (www.tomsguide.com/round-up/best-root-apps)
In what way is the need for privileges for system stuff like boot config solved without root?
@Pantherina You might be interested in looking into the Plan 9 operating system. The original designers of Unix (on which Linux and BSDs are based) created the OS with lots of interesting ideas built into the core of the system, rather than bolted on afterwards. No root, userspace drivers, others you mentioned are explored.
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