Right then, before I get started, I ought to acknowledge that soft blocking isn’t quite as foolproof as proper air-gapping (removing wireless cards and the like). That might be straightforward enough on older hardware, mind you, but a fair few newer commercial laptops have their WiFi modules soldered directly onto the board. Just like RAM, I’m afraid so removing them is rather a blunder and not worth the bother for most users.
Now then, when I was setting up a new BTC view only wallet, I couldn’t for the life of me find a sensible way to disable networking without first booting into sysmaint to switch it off, which is a bit of a nuisance, to say the least. I had to install rfkill to manage it, as it isn’t included by default.
You can disable networking for Electrum when creating wallets from the command line with electrum --offline and -w to point where you’d like the wallet created, though I shan’t go into all that part. Electrum offline isn’t quite enough, you see, when the rest of the computer can still have a wag with the network stack.
On Windows 11/10, safe mode quite deliberately doesn’t load network adapter drivers, the Wi-Fi stack, or networking services, which effectively software air-gaps the computer from any local network or internet connection.
TailsOS, for its part, offers an additional option for booting with all networking disabled:
Qubes has its Vault qubes, which disable networking entirely—rather perfect for generating wallets and GPG split or private keys.
So my question is why on earth does Kicksecure not offer something similar for an easy workflow and a bit of adaptability for those of us mates on limited, non-legacy hardware?