ports VS NsCDE

I think OpenBSD comes the closest to what you want with its two easy to use syscalls that provide syscall filtering and restricting access to paths:

https://man.openbsd.org/pledge.2

https://man.openbsd.org/unveil.2

A few random examples:

https://github.com/tmux/tmux/blob/c8494dff7b6b9a996866edaf8c...

https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/master/www/mozilla-fir...

https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/master/www/mozilla-fir...

To get the best isolation you need to patch the source — the application needs to go through initial setup and then drop privileges to the absolute possible minimum. But it's easy to make custom wrappers for third-party applications — the above profiles taken from the OpenBSD ports tree are the proof.

Have you checked the no-ip port: https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/master/net/no-ip/pkg/noip2.rc

> https://github.com/openbsd/ports/commit/bf33ea5f3ff390d8cde3...

Now, this is surprising. I randomly clicked on that link and I immediately see that the code and the patch has a bug. It only checks the first 8 characters:

    -      if (gr != NULL && strncmp(gr->gr_name, "operator", 8) == 0)

Some people are working around this by using obsdfreqd, some by patching sys/kern/sched_bsd.c (change if (hw_power) to if (0 && hw_power)), some by simply setting to a lower speed (sysctl hw.perfpolicy=manual and hw.setperf=99 might be enough as this disables turbo mode found on some CPUs).

You could also look into a port that has a hard dependency on openssl like: https://github.com/openbsd/ports/tree/master/security/sslscan

For me it's the ease of management and good documentation.

For example, during 6.8 to 6.9 upgrade, there was a major postgresql upgrade.

It is mentioned in the doc https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade69.html (see Special packages at the bottom).

You're redirected to the package README with special instructions on how to setup and upgrade: https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/master/databases/postg...

Et voilà, everything is explained.

On debian, if I am not careful, I'll do an upgrade and risk breaking something during a db migration (I'm looking at you MySQL upgrades...).

Godot engine gamecontroller support. This is limited and incomplete, but it's a start. A huge number of indie games made with Godot are released every week; most of which work at least partially with an XBox {360,One} controller. You can follow This Week in Godot if you're interested.

> OpenBSD has handled this case for some years. I do not know if there was any breakage or fallout from this.

The other thing about OpenBSD is that when they make a change to their OS, they also go through to make sure all the (third-party) ports/packages:

* https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ports/

* https://github.com/openbsd/ports

do not break. So they're create patches for the software and and submit them upstream.

NsCDE freezes when deiconifying an icon on the desktop · Issue #113 · NsCDE/NsCDE – Closed

This one is maybe even older, but conforms to your description of what you are searching for. https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

Sounds perfect for debian stable. Aside from distro, this github might be interesting for you.

Like NsCDE [1], these kinds of old school environments are nice an all until you fire up a modern browser or an app made for Gnome and you end up in a kind of aesthetic mess.

[1] https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

then NsCDE is the gigachad meme