Attributes only apply to the directory’s own allocation table and child directories have their own tables.

Thanks. It has been a while, but I was fairly certain that this was the case, glad to have the confirmation. 👍

If you’d like to look into it further. the +i flag in chattr is setting an attribute making the file (everything in Linux is a file, so yes this even means directories) immutable. When a file is immutable, it isn’t possible to change the ownership, group, name, or permissions of the file, nor will you be able to write, append, or truncate the file.

It’s been a while since I’ve used it, but I don’t believe it’s possible to have an immutable directory where you can still modify the contents therein, but I may be misremembering that. It would seem unlikely since adding content to the directory should require that you modify the links for the directory, which shouldn’t be allowable with an immutable object?

It’s possible that the +a chattr attribute may achieve what you’d prefer. I believe that flag will make it so that files (and again, everything in Linux is a file) can be created and modified, but never deleted. I’ve actually never used this one, but I can foresee how this still may not be ideal for your wishes since updates to games may expect to be able to delete old content which would be thwarted here. 🤷

I’m now deeply curious if it works for your use case. Hit me back if you give it a go and let me know if it works out or not.

If gaming with Nvidia hardware is your primary concern, then maybe Bazzite would suit you. It’s based on Immutable Fedora, with tweaks to give it a SteamOS like experience. It offers Gnome or KDE for the desktop, and supposedly has everything dialed in for gaming. I’ve heard a bunch about it doing great with Nvidia cards and gaming in general, I suspect that you’d be able to do everything else you might need via the desktop it provides, but I have no knowledge of how it handles multiple monitors so maybe therein lies the fatal flaw.

If you use a fancy official VPN client from Mullvad, PIA, etc, you won’t need this since most clients already have a kill switch built in (also called Lockdown Mode in Mullvad).

According to the researchers…

The result of this is the user transmits packets that are never encrypted by a VPN, and an attacker can snoop their traffic. We are using the term decloaking to refer to this effect. Importantly, the VPN control channel is maintained so features such as kill switches are never tripped, and users continue to show as connected to a VPN in all the cases we’ve observed.

Killswitches are insufficient protection since the TunnelVision attack never disables the VPN tunnel. The TunnelVision attackers are instructing your physical layer connection to route everything through a node of their choosing rather than killing your VPN connection, and since the VPN connection never drops, a killswitch will never engage. The VPN stays up, thinking it is doing a good job, but in the meantime your network interface has been instructed to route no traffic through the VPN and instead route everything to the location of the attacker’s choosing. I have heard that a couple of VPNs think their clients are not vulnerable here, but I haven’t seen independent conclusive proof one way or the other yet.

I suspect that your “Solution” also fails to mitigate the issues in TunnelVision because it allows LAN access to the physical interface. In a TunnelVision attack the hostile has to be on your LAN (or rather the same LAN you are on since I suspect that “The coffee shop wi-fi” is the more likely network for an attack like this) already, so if they’re going to tell your interface to route traffic somewhere else, in all likelihood that somewhere else will already be in the same LAN you are and their exfiltration will be allowed under your configuration.

I’ve dabbled with Linux on Mac hardware a couple of times and I’ve got to say that Linux DEs generally hew closer to Windows conventions than Mac ones and I found using the Mac keyboard with Linux to be a dreadful experience without the fact that the chiclet keyboards are the worst shit I’ve ever put my fingers on.

I very quickly snagged a standard mechanical qwerty 104 key with brown switches and cursed every moment that I had to use that abominable keyboard built into the stupid MacBook. Apple seems determined to do things different for the sake of different as much as they possibly can and trying to adapt all their nonsense to the Win/Lin way of doing things made my life worse in numerous ways (most DEs have great remapping for keys and such, but it gets messy fast if you’ve got apps from different paradigms.)

I’d very much recommend against going out of your way to get a Mac keyboard for using Linux unless you enjoy fighting against things. But hey, if that’s your kink, then a Mac keyboard with Linux would be my recommended way to go.

I genuinely hope that you’re kidding. If you’re not. No. Just no.

A process running as root does not need a prompt or any user interaction to do whatever the hell it wants on most (nearing ALL, but I’d be wary of absolutes with Linux) systems. I’m unaware of any means that a Desktop Environment could restrict a process running with root permissions by requiring an interactive prompt of some sort for anything. If your DE is running as root, all of its children are also running as root (unless you’ve rigged things up to run explicitly as other users) which means just about anything you are doing could be running rampant malicious actors on your system and nothing would seem amiss until it made itself evident.

Now, it does seem unlikely that anyone has written any malicious code that would run in a browser expecting to be root on a Linux system, so that’s likely the saving grace here, but that’s only security through obscurity and that’s not much to hang your hopes on for any system you care about.

I have zero issues with the external drive if it’s connected directly, but for the fact that it takes up the USB port so I can’t charge while I’m using the drive and that makes using it for Windows dual boot a non-starter since Windows “power management” is a complete joke and the battery life isn’t enough to do any serious gaming.

But if I don’t mind only getting a couple of hours of runtime for games when in Windows, direct connecting the drive via USB-C and an enclosure is the only setup that seems to work. As soon as I want to get some power in the mix, it’s nothing but failures all around.

Sorry if it wasn’t clear, these are all powered USB-C hubs, the Lenovo one is the docking station for my Lenovo laptop.

Have you tried an enclosure for the drive with its own dedicated power source?

Good question. The same behavior also happens with an externally powered Western Digital Spinning Disk USB3 HDD, I haven’t ever found an externally powered NVMe enclosure but I had thought about that possibility. I should also note that the two external NVMe enclosures I have used don’t see any interruption for the LEDs on the enclosure when the power state change happens and any other USB connected peripheral continues to operate without interruption further complicating this situation.

Why aren’t people pushing at Apple users to make that switch themselves

If you’ve ever tried to get someone to use the non-default… anything, you would probably note that most people will not go out of their way to use something that isn’t the default. The fact that Apple doesn’t allow you to set another messenger app means that your appeal to most Apple users will quickly run into the neat wall that Apple keeps around their garden. It doesn’t hurt Apple’s defense of that default that they convey a special status to users of the default, why would someone who is special in the default app (blue bubble) go out of their way to be a normie elsewhere?

Not the OP, but it’s decently well documented that there are games out there that are having a tough time with the memory constraints of the Steam Deck’s 16 GB: https://youtu.be/z94TcihZxME?t=145

Now I’ll grant that maybe it’s a memory leak in TLoU that would cause you to still run into issues regardless of maximum memory but 16 GB is the recommended minimum and is starting to be the minimum recommended for other newer games and that’s without having a chunk set aside for VRAM, so I’d bet that you’d see decent performance gains just by increasing the available RAM without it running at higher clocks.

The list of games that want combined RAM/VRAM in excess of 16GB is steadily increasing*, if there were an easy means of getting my Steam Deck to 32 GB, I’d jump on it. I haven’t had less than 32 GB in my desktop daily driver since 2017 and honestly the 64 GB I have now starts to feel anemic once you’ve got a VM or two running with Chrome and a game all having to contend for the same resources. Honestly, I’ve never felt like I had too much memory, but I have definitely felt it performance wise when I don’t have enough, where things start to stutter and the frame pacing goes all to hell while things are shuffled in and out of memory. Speed isn’t nothing, but there is definitely an increasing argument to be made for quantity as well.

*

1. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1716740/STARFIELD/
2. https://store.steampowered.com/app/990080/Hogwarts_Legacy/
3. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1282100/Remnant_II/
4. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1649240/Returnal/
5. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1680880/Forspoken/
6. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2124490/SILENT_HILL_2/
7. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1888930/The_Last_of_Us_Part_I/

I’m also using a custom launcher and a Pixel 7a, and have always had the ability to copy the text from app previews in recents. I only learned the other day that this was Pixel exclusive, I hadn’t heard it was supposed to be launcher exclusive.