Include Feather Wallet in next release?

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Right then, chaps. First off, top work on Kicksecure solid bit of kit, this. I’ve been having a proper look through the docs and noticed something that’s left me a bit gobsmacked, to be honest.

The Issue at Hand

Monero is listed under pre-installed applications, mind you right there (alongside Thunderbird). Only trouble is, it isn’t actually in the ISO, is it? This looks like a improper copy of Whonix’s page where it is included there. I’m not mad about it really but lets get into shall we mate.

The Proposal

Now, what I’d like to put forward, if I may, is getting Feather Wallet bundled in for the next release. It’s the lightweight, Electrum-style wallet for Monero, and rather crucially, it’s now sitting pretty in trixie-backports and looks to be making its way into main before long or may have already.

Why Feather, Specifically?

I can already hear the groans. “oh, here we go, another crypto bro wanting his favourite coin in the distro.” Fair enough, I get it. But hear me out, yeah?

The Monero lot are obsessed with security, not just privacy. We’re talking about a community that audits everything twice like a religion. Ye already know that, yeah? I know its included in Whonix but Whonix is not portable yet for time being.

Here’s the kicker, and I reckon this is where it gets proper interesting. No other distro I know of currently ships Feather in a packaged ISO that you can Flash to a USB stick, and boot on an airgapped machine (offline). Then proceed to create cold wallets without first connecting to the internet to download wallet software.

Having it pre-installed and already verified by the Kicksecure team and from debian package? Game changer, mate. Proper game changer.

Let’s not pretend crypto wallets are all the same. Feather’s been around since 2020, it’s fully open-source, no bloat, and clean and arguably better then Monero GUI unless you a mad lad with a bloodly full node. As a byproduct it would attract the exact user base who care about actual security and boost kicksecure usage. Kicksecure it kinda niche and I’m just now really tinkering with it. Up until now I last used it in a VM on 17 which wasn’t really a stable experience but alot has changed since and feeling more nice.

What do you reckon? Anyone else keen on this, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

In closing for the love of all that is holy, don’t go slapping it in as a Flatpak install that would be absolutely gross, that proper cringe mate.

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In Forky and later possibly, but in Trixie, very highly unlikely. Debian’s stable release philosophy is very strict and results in the main archive for a stable release being frozen as much as is possible without being outright unsafe due to security issues or high-severity bugs.

Getting things from trixie-backports into Kicksecure isn’t exactly impossible, but it’s undesirable, because trixie-backports generally requires the use of pinning to get packages installed from the correct repo, and shipping pinning config in apt packages is dangerous and something we’ve historically avoided. See:

What would theoretically be possible is to copy the feather-wallet package from trixie-backports into Kicksecure’s own repos, but that comes with a maintenance burden that I’m not sure we want to take on (we have quite a lot on our plate already). That’s a question for @Patrick.

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Related:

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Cheers for the detailed explanation, much appreciated, and it does clarify the situation rather well in me noggin.

I was wondering, if you wouldn’t mind indulging me. How exactly is Electrum properly included in Kicksecure at present? Is it sourced from the main Debian repositories via APT, perhaps distributed as a Flatpak, or is it compiled from upstream mates directly? I should be most grateful if you could shed some light on the matter?

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BTW I had a go at uploading a screenshot of the Kicksecure homepage, you see, showing that any Monero wallet had been rather incorrectly listed as included in the disty. I’m afraid the uploads aren’t permitted, or something of that sort.

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APT.

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Feather as nice as Cake, btw?

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Feather as nice as Cake, btw?

Feather is better than cake if what you are looking for are:

  • simplicity and leanness of the software
  • single coin (XMR only)
  • does one thing and does it well: store, receive and send moneros
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Last I checked cake is just an AppImage and is mainly built for mobile applications.

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Kicksecure is not tails so the manual instructions on the Linux “Get Started” link are essentially the same. As much as I like Cake Wallet, I think it should stay on mobile systems where it is initially was created for.

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Cake is compiled with dart and flutter applications have had issues X11/Wayland compositors. Not only that but how Cake stores wallet/keys is greatly different to Electrum/Feather.

Feather Wallet and Electrum Wallet uses a file-based approach like wallet .key for wallets/keys. Cake stores wallets/keys in a database approach. There may be some debate to what is better for security and more importantly secure deletion of wallet/keys files vs SQLite WAL/journal files. That is not my fortay per say but just my take on the matter.

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Right then, if Electrum comes from the APT stable branch, how’s it any different from Feather, eh? Not being a snob about it, mind you just genuinely curious, mate.

How would you propose Feather be included in Kicksecure, eh? What criteria would it need to meet, exactly? And while we’re on the subject, is Flatpak actually safe compared to traditional APT, or is that just a bit of a tall tale?

I reckon I ought to mention I’ve had Flatpak installs go completely off kilter before due to conflicts between bwrap and AppArmor, so that’s precisely why I’m sitting on the sidelines about it now.

Feather uses networking, and users probably don’t want its networking stack to have issues, eh? I’ve regularly used the .AppImage myself, but I saw it’s making its way into proper Debian now, so I thought I’d ask.

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Electrum is in Debian Trixie’s main repository. Feather is in Debian Trixie’s backports repository. The main repository is where Kicksecure gets most of its packages and has a default package priority. The backports repository has a lower package priority (Debian upstream choice, unspecific to Kicksecure) and so you can’t install packages from it without either going out of your way to install packages from it manually, or pinning those packages. Pinning is not a (good) option as explained above.

Ideally it would need to be in Debian’s main repository, which almost certainly won’t be the case until Debian Forky (14) at the earliest. Specific criteria beyond that I don’t really have, it depends on whether we think a substantial portion of our userbase will use the software and thus it justifies “bloating” the ISO further to include it.

That’s a complicated question. Generally we like to keep one topic per forum post so that posts can be reliably searched for and cross-referenced, so I can go into more detail on that if you’d like to make a new post about the it.

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Yeah, Forky’s not out till 2027? Bloody hell haha

Feather’s lightweight enough, hardly bloat, really…but I take your point about keeping the ISO trim n lean. Another thing, partly why I said NOT to go the Flatpak route is it’d likely use up a smidge more disk space then APT.

Right, sorry about that, mate.

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