Hi, Im searching for a secure distro for normal daily use for my laptop. Currently Im running arch linux with full disk encryption, secure boot, linux hardened, firewalld and most apps as flatpaks (with some disabled permissions using flatseal). I think its pretty secure laptop but it could be more secure.
Tails and Whonix are the most secure but they are not ment for normal daily use...
There is a lot of new immutable distros. Getting (system) malware is harder to get on them. Im most interested in blendOS, because its based. Does anyone know if it has full disk encryption, secure boot, etc. or can it be done by the user? What about other distros like Fedora Silverblue?
While technically not a Linux distro, Qubes OS is the gold standard. With the primary cons being that it's kinda hard on system requirements and it doesn't play nice with dedicated GPUs and thus software that would require it.
Honorable mentions would be Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite/Sericea, Kicksecure, openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa and Vanilla OS. Of course, regular Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed are still good even without being immutable. The aforementioned distros all have varying levels of hardening out of the box. While the offerings of Fedora and openSUSE have better defaults than most other distros, Kicksecure -which is made by the same team behind Whonix- is almost completely hardened from the get-go. Vanilla OS is in a major overhaul, so I refrain from making any strong judgements on it yet.
For whatever it's worth, a couple of years ago the (infamous) Madaidan (AKA security researcher on Kicksecure and Whonix) did recommend running minimalist distros like Alpine, Artix, Gentoo and Void for the sake of security. However, he did that recommendation on the basis of minimalism and zero-trust. However, that would require the system administrator (read: you) to actually know their shit. Which, unfortunately, is often times not the case as not everyone that's sensitive of their digital security proceeds to study cybersecurity. That's where the "honorable mentions" in the previous paragraph come into play; all of the distros that were mentioned within actually have shown to take security very seriously and acknowledge with the amount of heavy-lifting they do that they hold a sense of responsibility in that regard.
Im most interested in blendOS, because its based.
I once had an interaction with its primary developer and the dude was oblivious on which MAC was configured on his distro; spoiler-alert: none. It does a bunch of cool stuff, but I wouldn't call it secure (by default) by any stretch of the imagination.
Thank you for your detailed answer! Im already using a minimalist distro (arch) with (almost) no problems. Before that I used Fedora. Becase of that and your recommendation I will probably switch to silverblue. Im a little scared of selinux (I was thinkering too much with fedora) but better with it than without. For AUR apps I will use distrobox. I would also like to try toolbx for my projects!
Im a little scared of selinux (I was thinkering too much with fedora) but better with it than without.
Yup, SELinux is definitely a double-edged sword in that it's very powerful but can therefore be a bit more restrictive. Though, currently it's our only bet when it comes to confining containers as it's (vastly) superior over AppArmor in that aspect. Which explains openSUSE's recent conversion from AppArmor to SELinux for their distros that rely heavily on container workflows; like MicroOS, Aeon, Kalpa etc. Unfortunately it's not the easiest to understand, but I'm sure you'll manage 😉!
I guess you're getting to the point in security where you really should consider the cost/benefit of safety vs convenience. Do you really want or need to have an immutable system? While there's obviously an argument to be made about the security benefits on those distros, I'd say that they're mainly made for CI/CD, cloud environments etc, and probably not something you want to put in a laptop and use as a daily driver. Your laptop is likely already more secure than 99% of other laptops, and in the end all you need to not get malware are a firewall and common sense if you're not an exposed entity.
Seems to me like you already have a secure setup. You just need to keep it secure. I personally can't imagine downgrading from using Arch to an inflexible immutable distro.
Puppy Linux - the OS is spooled into RAM from a single signed compressed image. by default there is no write back to physical data store; this can include user folders etc. each boot can be a clean slate.
Since the OS itself is in a single compressed & signed package, if someone alters it via a sidecar boot to an alt OS, it and you would know.
When there are chain of custody issues it is pretty secure when added with the usual bevy of other securing options.
Openbsd is really good but it is not linux. It doesn't have as much packages as linux and may perform a bit slower on applications compared to it's linux counterpart. Also, drivers for some hardware may not be available for Openbsd. Some filesystems like btrfs are not supported.
Still, openbsd and freebsd are worth checking out for learning about UNIX like OSes and routers, servers etc. It can also be daily driven if you can make do with the available packages.
Any distro, really. Tails and Tor may have some extra features but aren't mandatory by any means. Just make sure Common Sense Antivirus (tm) is g2g and you should be good.