Just installed Xubuntu :)

[Sinn3rman]

Just installed Xubuntu, so far id have to say im liking it :) very responsive and minimalist.

I had alot of uncertainty using unity for my desktop, i think xfce fits the bill. Now to find as many reasons to not boot windows and get these certs done!

Point: Im curious from a security perspective, when u introduce a GUI you obviously inherit security concerns. Are there any Xwindows systems that are more secure than others?

[cooper]

You have X.org which everybody and their goldfish uses, there's MIR which gets force-fed to Ubuntu users and there's Weston which is a reference implementation of a Wayland Compositor and that's trying to break ground but from what I gather isn't really there just yet.

The problem the alternatives to X.org all face is the ubiquitous use of X.org throughout the UNIX world. If some program works on X and not on something else, people will see that as being caused by that something else even though it might very well not be.

I would argue that when you have a security-sensitive machine, it should not run a windowing environment unless the security-sensitive service itself requires it.

If you're simply talking about your home workstation, shut down X, run nmap, start up X, run nmap again and have your firewall block remote access to everything that's present in the second nmap output but not the first. Oh, and move any security-sensitive stuff away from this machine since it has no business being there.

[Sinn3rman]

Spot on :) this machine does not have files of concern, but the thought crossed my mind from a normal users perspective whilst covering chapters on OS hardening and such. Thanks Cooper, ill try the nmap thing as soon as time permits :)