I came across a project today called Spectrum OS which I am pleased to say is the coolest and most exciting idea I have found people talking about in awhile. I like sandboxing. I like knowing that all the little computer instructions are neatly tucked into their little boxes.
I discovered systemd unit hardening this year and have been playing around with systemd-analyze security. I use faillock and usbguard now, and I qualified for a Red Hat certification on Linux Security with the help of a course from Sander Van Vugt which was fun! I don’t claim to be an expert on it, though. I mean, I’m not contributing to LSM projects in the Linux kernel.
Recently I’ve been using hardware security keys more too. I issued a GPG key, cloned it to three YubiKeys, and setup SSH over FIDO which has been very useful. I like knowing that I can actually use GPG without worrying about losing a key. I also like the fact that I have to physically verify actions.
Anyway, I tried QubesOS many years ago and thought it was cool as a concept but very clunky and difficult for everyday use. I switched to openSUSE, then later to NixOS because the framework laptop I purchased was stuck in customs and I wanted to work on my OS.
Incidentally, it turns out that I love NixOS. It feels like I can design an operating system that is an extension of my body.
Lose the hardware I use? No problem, I can spin up the same environment in minutes. It makes me feel less attached to my posessions, which is appealing to me as a buddhist. I like knowing that my OS is saved in version control, moreover that I can locally rollback changes whenever I want because of its atomicity. Packages are locked within a flake, and builds are in theory reproducible and verifiable.
Plus, the community around NixOS is huge and there are so many nixpkgs.
All of this is to say that I was very pleased to find this project, and that I feel motivated to get back into software. I just need to rewrite my dotfiles from scratch and maybe de-slop my corroded psyche from being addicted to using LLMs.
I started writing about why I quit working in software and became a hardware engineer in the first place and quickly realized that I should write a separate post about that