I’ve been following Kicksecure’s development with genuine interest. From Debian morphing a Debian install to v17 and hardening Debian VM’s. To more recently just now doing a bare metal Kicksecure installation on my laptop.
I wanted to share some perspective as a relatively new user and perhaps get clarity on the project’s broader vision. Kicksecure clearly prioritizes security hardening, but I’m trying to understand who the intended audience is beyond “security focused” individuals. Is the project positioning itself as a production ready daily driver, or is it currently more of a WIP/hobby project that evolved from the Whonix ecosystem?
In all honesty Kicksecure feels like it’s in a state of continuous active maintenance rather than settled stability point. It’s not unusable, but I dont think it’s quite there yet. Reasonably around 75% to being at a point where it will be less maintenance/patches IMO. In all honestly this is probably largely in part of the DE switch from XFCE to LXQt and integration of sysmaint.
The base DE was a learning curve for me as it’s the first time I have used
LXQt at the same time as fully Kicksecure. This prob increases the learning curve of those that want to make the full switch.
I’m also curious about the current user base composition. What is the majority of the user base?
Qubes/VM users with templates or VM installs?
Morphed or hardened Debian derivatives?
Bare metal Kicksecure host installations?
Understanding this would help me (and potentially others) better evaluate whether Kicksecure aligns with our needs and how we might contribute feedback or support. I ask respectfully because I believe the project has significant potential to reach a wider audience with some additional clarity around its goals and roadmap. Not too many people know about this niche (awesome) distro.
There isn’t much of an additional intended audience. Kicksecure is intended to work for arbitrary computing needs for users who are security-conscious or have higher security requirements.
It is intended to be a production-ready daily driver. It is under continuous active development and maintenance, and will be for the foreseeable future, but it is ready for active use now. It can be a bit bumpy (especially when needing to configure labwc or other Wayland-related things by editing text files) and is easiest to use if you have some level of technical skill, but it’s getting better all the time.
I understand the reasoning, but could some of these recent changes actually be introducing more maintenance that needs fixing? I have faith that things will sort themselves out over time as Wayland continues to mature across most distributions. Just a few months ago, many Linux applications had significant issues, but those problems seem to have largely subsided now.
From what I’ve researched, it seems fair to say that most distributions use Mutter or KWin. Kicksecure, however, takes a different approach by using labwc because of its lightweight design, which offers security advantages, and that makes sense. That said, I suspect labwc might be causing additional bugs when paired with LXQt, leaving distributions like Kicksecure to inherit and work around those issues/bugs.
After all, labwc is intentionally minimal and lacks certain features that full desktop environments typically provide for a smoother UX.
labwc-tweaks when? and is there any other GUI tools that integrate with controlling labwc in the works (configuring keyboard shortcuts)?
labwc was chosen because it was the only Wayland compositor reasonably suitable for use with LXQt in a VM. See:
Probably not until the release of Debian Forky at the earliest, possibly never if Debian doesn’t package it. Upstream doesn’t sign their releases or Git commits, and we try to not package architecture-specific code for the sake of supporting multiple processors without complicated build infrastructure. It’s possible we will introduce graphical tools of our own for configuring labwc in the future, but this isn’t planned at the moment.