KDE Plasma 5.11 Rolls Into Beta With New System Settings, Better Wayland Support

[Danny3]

KDE does not spy on you. Implementing privacy settings would be useless for two reasons:
- AFAIK neither USB nor PCI(e) devices can be restricted to certain applications, you can just disable them for the whole system. Therefore such settings would not be a barrier for malicious applications, just "recommendations" for nice applications on how to please the user.
- Widespread multi-platform applications from big companies like Chrome/Chromium or Steam would never respect some non-standard practices of one or two desktop environments with a share of 0-3% of the applications' user base (non-standard in respect to dominant operating systems, of course...).

I know KDE is not spying on me, but I'm afraid other programs might. Especially the closed source ones.
I just want a privacy / security control panel where I can disable programs access to webcam and mike like Android and Windows 10 has.
Too bad no desktop environment takes privacy seriously.

[ssokolow]

I know KDE is not spying on me, but I'm afraid other programs might. Especially the closed source ones.
I just want a privacy / security control panel where I can disable programs access to webcam and mike like Android and Windows 10 has.
Too bad no desktop environment takes privacy seriously.

It's more about the architecture of the system as a whole. If you've been around long enough, you might remember what a struggle it was to get some applications to not bypass the mixer and claim the audio output exclusively.

The kind of control you want requires that every application be automatically run in some kind of sandbox, even if that sandbox defaults to "allow all".

The problem is that the sandbox itself can result in bugs. For example, I want to write a game launcher with a bunch of "fix common mistakes" features, like using a union/overlay filesystem to ensure that attempts by games to write to their install folders (some do) get redirected to a folder where I can make backups without having to back up all the bits I can just re-download from GOG or Humble or wherever... it turns out that just using OverlayFS (the one built into the Linux kernel) on whatever kernel I was running for *buntu 14.04 causes some games to claim that some resource files are missing.

Because of that, they're not willing to rush on this issue.

[Awesomeness]

There is nothing in the announce itself about Wayland being ready for prime time or not.

“Plasma's Wayland support has been long in the making, and while it isn't fully there as a replacement for X11, more and more users enjoy Wayland on a daily basis.”

Reading is hard, I know…