New linux distro to keep an eye on: PrivOS

General
1

I found this new privacy-focused distro which is being developed, and thought it is something to consider in the future. It’s still fairly early in development, but it would be interesting to see what changes over time.

Some interesting defaults:

  • 3 browsers preinstalled: Brave (customized with better privacy settings), Mullvad, and Tor
  • Signal desktop
  • MAC address randomization
  • Mullvad DNS

If you’ve seen this distro being discussed elsewhere, I’m aware of the IPv4 vs. IPv6 issue, but I think this distro is a good step in the right direction anyway.

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KDE puts me off from trying. It reminds me too much of windows by the looks of it and I can’t get myself to like something that looks like Windows.

But since this is extremely experimental, I’m sure this will make news again when they get a lot better and useful for privacy enthusiasts who need something between Fedora and Tails/Whonix.

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I was also a bit hesitant about KDE, not because of the appearance, but because it can be buggy. I prefer customized GNOME, or some other middle-ground DE like Cinnamon or Budgie. The GNOME customizations that Zorin and Pop OS have done are good examples, although Pop OS will focus on its own new DE in the future.

But once new distros become more established, they often start to support 2 or more DE’s, so maybe they’ll support another one in the future. Let’s see.

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It’s nice to see but I would rather this be a bunch of scripts than a standalone distro, good for developer but I wouldn’t use a one-person dsitro. it’s just too risky.

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I also wouldn’t use a one-person distro.

The GitHub page says it’s a group of students in Barcelona, but they really should show some evidence of that, so that people know it has a better chance of being supported in future.

But I wish them all the best with it and hope it turns out great.

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Their choice to disable IPv6 makes them dead on arrival.

1/2 the internet has switched to IPv6, and IPv4 has been officially deprecated. This is the official word on IPv4:

The use of IPv4 is deprecated. The term “deprecated” is used to indicate a feature, characteristic, or practice that should be avoided, in this case because it is being superseded by a newer protocol. The term does not indicate that the practice is harmful, but that there will be no further development in IPv4…

as copied from IETF Will Continue Maintaining IPv4 of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that designs and guides the IP protocol.

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Looks like it’s based on standard Ubuntu it should be easy to change the DE.

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If it’s based on Ubuntu, then it’s already worse than Fedora and especially secureblue.

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It’s not a group of students, it’s one student.

This is a project to create a privacy-first Ubuntu derivative as a learning experience by a 42-Barcelona student.

42 Barcelona is a school: Find Out 42 Barcelona's campus in Spain | 42 - The Network

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Yes? but I don’t remember it was about Ubuntu vs Fedora?