Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Ok thanks. Are flatpaks better for isolation than snaps? I see many people avoid snaps.
IIRC the flapak packaging system is completely open source while snap does not release the server code.
Also, snaps were forced to the users, had terrible performance at the start, thus, making them unpopular.
Neither isolates everything. Both have some isolation features. The features enabled by default vary from package to package, so you would have to look at the permissions on each package to find out.
For a bit more isolation than a flatpak/snap, I suggest creating a separate user account for running chromium (or any other moderately nosy software). Note that linux lets you log in to two accounts at the same time, each with its own desktop, and switch between them. Check out your desktop environment's "switch user" function.
For even more isolation, you could run chromium in a hypervisor-based virtual machine.
I just use chromium when needed. Not ideal but usually works in place of chrome.
If you don't like flatpak there is also firejail which you can run to isolate browsers or many other programmes.
There is also a programme to run your browser from ram and commit changes to disk when it closes, which I've used for a year or so and can recommend. I have to look up the name later at home, if you are interested.
Browsers write to disk every couple odd seconds per default settings (I think up to 20gb a day), which eats away on an ssds life cycle. in Firefox this can be changed, but the in ram option makes it smappier as well as a benefit.
You could try Qubes OS? Portable version maybe? That's quite easy and sucure.
Why would suggest a jump from Ubuntu to qubes?
Afaik Qubes runs all software in containers,
which isolates them from each other,
which is great for privacy.
However, OP only asked for Chrome,
and I assume the jump to Qubes might be too big.
To only isolate Chrome,
I'd recommend a Flatpak instead.
Or even better Ungoogled-Chromium.
Oh, I just figured that a portable version of an isolated OS would be a decent alternative. Bit you're right maybe a bit too much