Valve Offers Up New Privacy Settings For Steam Gamers

[starshipeleven]

The aproach you guys suggest takes into account your willingness to have 32bit libs on your machine from the start.

The 32bit libs are in their own folder and accessible only by flatpacked applications. You don't need to have 32bit libs or multiarch installed in your own distro.

Which is why I said "yes and no". They are technically there, but they are not part of your distro, not causing conflicts or breaking havoc.

And not to mention adding yet another layer, flatpak, on top of that. To me it would make more sense to make the system multilib and install Steam. And that is what I have done.

The main selling point of flatpacked applications is the sandbox, i.e. they DO NOT have access to anything outside their own folder, and never require to be run as root to install themselves (flatpack itself is run as root but that is the package manager, not the application).

While running them as normal through multilib will give them access to everything you have access (the user, not root), and installation requires giving them root access.

This is an important feature.

For me, I have stopped buing games from Steam and started looking into throwing my money elsewhere.

I play on Windows, on another PC, all gaming problems solved.

[audir8]

It's not a true 64-bit system until you've turned IA32_EMULATION and X86_X32 off in the kernel. I'm not sure what uses the latter, but the former is a must have for gaming. Any number of Wine/Steam/GOG games require it. I have those flags off for the machine I don't game on, and I'm pretty sure a Flatpak containing 32 bit libs wouldn't run on it. For the machine I game on, I just use multilib. If security concerns with 32-bit libraries ever gets large enough, maybe we'll have 64-bit-only Steam and games, give it a decade or two.

GOG games like FTL, and a few others will run fine on a 64-only system though.

[starshipeleven]

It's not a true 64-bit system until you've turned IA32_EMULATION and X86_X32 off in the kernel.

That's somewhat hard to justify, though.

GOG games like FTL, and a few others will run fine on a 64-only system though.

Yay! FTL isn't exactly a graphics-intensive game. It's a 2D game using 2D sprites.

[fuzz]

It's not a true 64-bit system until you've turned IA32_EMULATION and X86_X32 off in the kernel. I'm not sure what uses the latter, but the former is a must have for gaming. Any number of Wine/Steam/GOG games require it. I have those flags off for the machine I don't game on, and I'm pretty sure a Flatpak containing 32 bit libs wouldn't run on it. For the machine I game on, I just use multilib. If security concerns with 32-bit libraries ever gets large enough, maybe we'll have 64-bit-only Steam and games, give it a decade or two.

GOG games like FTL, and a few others will run fine on a 64-only system though.

x32 is actually not true 32 bit, it's a separate ABI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI

So technically when people refer to 32 bit as "x32" to refer to IA-32 they are not correct, but so few people even remember x32 that the point comes across regardless .

[audir8]

That's somewhat hard to justify, though.

Yay! FTL isn't exactly a graphics-intensive game. It's a 2D game using 2D sprites.

It depends on what you want to do offcourse, but I haven't had any problems turning off IA32_EMULATION and doing no-multilib for Scala development. Now, if I was doing android or something, it might be different. I even had a dual-boot IA32_EMULATION kernel for a while, just so I could file bugs and find alternatives. I think most people who don't game, could definitely turn it off and claim some superior security if your distro provides a no-multilib runtime. Gentoo FTW!

fuzz yes, I'm not sure who even bothered to use it. I think it can safely be tossed in the same legacy bin as normal 32-bit and 16-bit dos.

[starshipeleven]

most people who don't game, could definitely turn it off and claim some superior security if your distro provides a no-multilib runtime. Gentoo FTW!

They can claim anything they want, the issue is backing up the claims.

The main issue in a 32-bit multilib environment isn't the libraries (that get updated at the same pace of the 64-bit version in a normal distro), but the crap software you installed that still requires them.

[audir8]

I think it is good security practice to turn off anything you'll never need or use. I didn't hear about anything other than gaming or certain emulators that do require the kernel flag.

[starshipeleven]

I think it is good security practice to turn off anything you'll never need or use.

True, but in this case the security increase is insignificant at best.

I didn't hear about anything other than gaming or certain emulators that do require the kernel flag.

I would rather not have to recompile my kernel if I need to install a 32bit application for some contingent reason.

[audir8]

True, but in this case the security increase is insignificant at best.

I wouldn't call the additional security that the amd64 architecture offers over x86 insignificant, but hey, if you need to run x86 code, you need to run x86 code. I do for games.

[starshipeleven]

I wouldn't call the additional security that the amd64 architecture offers over x86 insignificant,

I didn't, I called insignificant the disabling of 32bit in the kernel. The additional security of 64bit comes from features that an application can use if in 64bit mode, from a malware point of view using 32bit or 64bit is the same.