What I’m Looking To Achieve:

Still newer to Linux, permissions is one of those things that screws with my head a lot still. What I am looking to do is, setup a new user on my system, and give it the bare minimum privileges specifically to play games. Therefore, those games and proprietary clients could not access any of my other files in certain cases. I understand an isolated system would be the best bet, but I do not have the hardware currently to do that. I figure a restricted user is better than none.

What The Restricted User Should Be Ideally:

The restricted user should only have access to the files it needs to run, it would need to be able to download clients (Lutris, Steam, Origin, etc), not be able to access all the files my main account can, be able to use stuff like WINE and Proton, and not be sandboxed/jailed.

My current setup is:

  • OS: Artix Linux x86_64
  • Kernel: 5.6.19.a-1-hardened
  • WM: bspwm

I’d appeciate some slight handholding on this, as I said I am still new and learning and permissions is something that still confuses me greatly and I have not dealt with it much. I’m quite honestly not sure where to even start with all this, as I’m not sure what I would give the new user access too and wouldn’t as far as system files, would I add it to the sudoers group because otherwise it can’t download stuff correct? Is it not concerning that it would have access to use sudo defeating the purpose of the permissions? And I’m sure there’s other stuff I’m not even thinking of that I would run into when trying to do this. Would definitely appreciate help. If you have any questions, feel free to ask away. Thanks! :penguin:

  • @gravityOP
    2•4 years ago

    I was thinking more on the line that if you want to play a game, you will log out of your main user, log into gamer, and start your game from there.

    Yeah, I was trying to avoid this as this would mean I’d have to essentially close out of all my stuff I believe which I didn’t want to do.

    sudo -u gamer steam

    I guess I could set some aliases up, or see if Rofi has any support for this, I know we’re slightly diving away from the original question but I do think it’s still relevant. But if anyone else comes along and has any ideas here I’d love to hear.

    Edit: Upon running that command, I am receiving an error which looks to be related to display?

    $ sudo -u gaming lutris
Unable to load locale dir, translations won't work.
No protocol specified
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused
No protocol specified
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused
No protocol specified
Error: unable to open display :0
2020-07-08 15:21:04,254: glxinfo call failed: Command '['glxinfo', '-B']' returned non-zero exit status 255.
2020-07-08 15:21:04,255: No available glxinfo output
2020-07-08 15:21:04,255: Invalid glxinfo received
2020-07-08 15:21:04,516: Getting full game list from MAME...
2020-07-08 15:21:04,516: MAME XML generation launched in the background, not returning anything this time
2020-07-08 15:21:04,516: MAME isn't installed, can't retrieve systems list.
No protocol specified
Can't open display :0
2020-07-08 15:21:04,547: Unable to read xrandr: Command '['xrandr']' returned non-zero exit status 1.
No protocol specified
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused

(lutris:10480): Gtk-WARNING **: 15:21:04.590: cannot open display: :0