Tray-Icons-Reloaded VS xkbcat

Tray Icons Reloaded

"It only works with Xorg and XWayland."

I don't know if there's an extension that works on all the icons, but if you're on Xorg, the Tray Icons Reloaded extension has a feature where it collapses app indicators into a … button. So your Discord and Slack icons are hidden, but your wifi status is still viable.

I use https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloaded/ and put the limit to one, then I don't see any icons except three dots which then shows my icons when I click on it in an overflow, like https://github.com/MartinPL/Tray-Icons-Reloaded/blob/master/.github/overflow.png

- Tray Icons Reloaded: https://github.com/MartinPL/Tray-Icons-Reloaded

I also change a few things using GNOME Tweaks; namely setting the application theme to Orchis-grey-dark-compact (https://github.com/vinceliuice/Orchis-theme), icon theme to Flatery-Dark (https://github.com/cbrnix/Flatery) and system font to Inter (https://rsms.me/inter/).

I've been using this setup for quite a while and I've been very happy with my computing experience, both in terms of aesthetics and overall UX. I tried tiling WMs for a while (first KWin and then i3 / Sway) but I found that I'm just a messy person who tends to be more productive with a floating WM.

I think the extension you want is Tray Icons: Reloaded. Have a look at its "overflow mode".

Yes, approximately. In X11 at least, the hardware codes are called keycodes, and the human readable names are called keysyms. Example ofuse of the XkbKeycodeToKeysym function in use: https://github.com/anko/xkbcat/blob/8abc3402cb679027a3bd0313...

Keysyms don't necessarily strictly match "key location"; keyboards are allowed to output whatever codes they want for whatever key they want (see e.g. QMK firmware; often used in custom keyboards to do complex conditional key remapping), but they're relatively consistent between common keys on most keyboards, and consistent on the same keyboard even if you switch keyboard layouts in software, or have some custom firmware which functionality is stateful.

>I don't know a single person that has ever fallen victim to a virus or malware on linux, and I've been using it almost exclusively for the past 20 years. If it was a threat vector, it clearly wasn't a very big issue.

So: no true Linux user succumbs to malwares and no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

Putting that aside, it doesn't take much effort to find an example of X11 keylogger that requires zero superuser privilege and zero explicit permission granting by the user. Here, the first result from DDGing "x11 keylogger": https://github.com/anko/xkbcat

It is hard to believe this has not occurred in the wild. If such attack really hasn't occurred before in the Linux world, I would rather use the unpopularity of Linux desktop as my justification.

i think you’re misunderstanding what a virus is or what it is a capable of. sudo (just like every other piece of software) can be exploited, which would allow anything (such as a malicious program) to get root privilege with no user input. there are also plenty of other approaches for viruses to take that wouldn’t require root, like X11 keylogging, and user namespace exploits just to name a few. being selective with what you run with sudo can help a lot don’t get me wrong, but it definitely isn’t some silver bullet. think of it like how windows can get malware without ever running something as administrator

For now, the focus is getting Wayland on par with Xorg. However, there are a number of infrastructure improvements behind the scenes that make it superior to Xorg. For example, applications can no longer silently capture keystrokes without elevated privileges. Demo.

It's a bit more complicated than that, but essentially yes, see e.g. xkbcat and some other of the keyloggers linked there.

Here's a keylogger i found while googling: https://github.com/anko/xkbcat

X11 provides no mechanism for keeping applications from reading potentially sensitive input. Consider this simple, 100-line program to log keystrokes, and consider what Zoom might be doing with this kind of power.