welcome, the distro is based on archlinux, no, it is archlinux with xfce4 the installer calamares, no; âyou are not windows or macOSâ yes you can change kernel but mano
Welcome.
Basically, you get an OS that is almost pure Arch linux. The installer ensures quick installation of the system in GUI mode. On the home page of the project probably you find the information you need.
It depends mainly on what you are guided by when choosing an OS. Since this distro is based on Arch, its advantages certainly include speed.
Currently, EOS is delivered with XFCE 4.14. In autumn, developers plan to release online-installer, in which you can make a choice during installation from 10 different DEâs. Nothing prevents you from removing XFCE and installing suitable DE e.g. after installing the system. Plasma is the same as in the official repos of Arch.
Rather it doesnât send, but if you run Wireshark, youâll probably learn everything
I like how XFCE is customised on EOS. Normally it looks pretty ugly on other distros such as Xubuntu and Manjaro XFCE edition. But so glad to see EOS has put in the effort to actually make it look very nice. It almost tempts me to just use XFCE, in fact it may even look better than KDE.
Is there anything unique about this distro compared to other distros out there?
Is KDE plasma designed differently compared to the default version of KDE?
Does it send telemetry data or anonymous data to the team, if so is it possible to disable this?
Can I do a full disk encryption for the partition that I install it in?
Can I easily change kernel from Linux to Linux-zen?
yes! using archlinux repositories itself.
other distros is a bit to generall, compared to other Archlinux based Distros, EndeavourOS is very close to Archlinux itself, not providing bloat of software and want to make you join the archway to install Packages and update the system.
Till now we do not provide to install other Desktops then XFCE4 by default from the installer ISO, this will change when we are ready to provide the netinstall ISO.
The sentence about the âplasmaâ could actually cause misunderstanding, so I changed it to make it more relevant to your question âŚ
But if youâre going to stay with the fast XFCE, this can be considered relatively unimportant
The problem with legislation like RIPA is that the burden of proof falls on you: If you cannot prove there is no data, thatâs your problem - and you could spend time in prison. Itâs that simple.
If an encryption scheme potentially offers a so called âhidden containerâ feature I wouldnât believe you even if you actually gave up all your passwords; and you couldnât prove you had! Obviously, plausible deniability also means that you cannot prove that data isnât there, and that youâre not simply holding something back - which could result in jail time. So be careful, thatâs the way it works.
You are hoping a court system will help you that requires individuals to surrender cryptographic keys to law enforcement even if this could incriminate oneself. Barbaric!
The best answer is simply not to travel to certain countries with âplausably deniable dataâ.
To answer your question, yes, Linux supports deniable encryption, but the installer EndeavourOS uses doesnât (and probably never will).
I recommend just going for LUKS but if you really want to go the hard way here is some info to get you going âŚ
I know for sure that VeraCrypt does offer full denaiable encryption on the partition Windows is installed by having a hidden container on the partition. So if you gave the outer container password, how would they exactly know that you are hiding something back without evidence?
Does LUKS support deniable encryption feature and does is it easy to set up using a GUI interface?
Can this stuff actually be done after the installation of the operating system?
They couldnât know and neither you or they could prove there was more hidden data. The best part: you can even hide data in the hidden portion and then hide data in this section, and so on âŚ
Now, everybody knows VeraCrypt (and TrueCrypt) has this feature so why should someone believe you didnât make extensive use of it. You simply canât prove that you havenât given up all your passwords.
The problem with this: for example in the UK you can be jailed for withholding your encryption keys, even if you genuinely forgot your password(s) because how would/could you prove that.
As long as law enforcement thinks youâre withholding youâre basically fâŚed.
XKCD said it all:
When would you stop using the wrench, knowing there is a âhidden containerâ feature?
It is actually a non-feature!
No! Well, you could copy your data into a encrypted system you set up later. You will not be able to convert your system in-place, though.
It is not that difficult to set up during the installation of EndeavourOS. If you donât need anything fancy like logical volumes there is a checkbox (âEncryptâ) that will get you set up.
If youâre interested in a little more complex setup, read this.
It seems you wonât let this deniability thing go so why donât you just do the following âŚ
Install EndeavourOS with the GUI installer and choose âEncryptâ. You will end up with a standard full disk encrypted system.
In this LUKS-encrypted system you can mount, create and modify VeraCrypt containers (from the usual GUI you know from Windows). Yes, you can actually even use the hidden container feature of VeraCrypt in Linux. (Here is a link about TrueCrypt on Arch, but it also applies to VeraCrypt).
Install VeraCrypt by typing this in a terminal âŚ
sudo pacman -S veracrypt
So you could give up your EndeavourOS password and your VeraCrypt container outer password and still have data in the hidden part.
Voila, I think thatâs what you would consider as plausible deniability.
You can read about LVM here, but I would advise you just to forget about them at this stage of your knowledge.
All? Youâll never get to install then
Seriously, just go with steps 1. and 2. right now. (Next install you can then maybe go for LVMonLUKS etc.)
(Hereâs some general information regarding luks)
To keep it simple:
LUKS is basically dm-crypt with a luks header. In this header some information (keys, etc.) is stored. One can actually look at the encrypted data and know that it is luks-encrypted. So this certainly isnât deniable encryption.
But you could store and access the luks header someplace else, for example a USB-stick, which leaves you with pure random data on your encrypted partition/drive. Just as pure dm-crypt would give you. This could be considered as deniable encrytion.
Nobody could prove with certainty that they are looking at encrypted data and not random data.
But letâs get real. What else would a couple of GiB up to TiB of ârandom dataâ be, other than encrypted data. And with SSDâs becoming the standard, well, filling a ssd with random data to delete/shred data just isnât necessary and actually really stupid. I certainly wouldnât believe you if you told me you werenât hiding data.
If you actually mean the hidden container feature of VeraCrypt when talking about plausible deniability, then no, this isnât a standard feature of LUKS.
But if you read up on the links I provided in my earlier posts you will see it can be done. Just not per GUI and it may be a bit complicated for someone not used to the terminal and without any knowledge of the Linux filesystem etc.
