sbctl VS mainline

No, this isn't true nor correct.

Secure Boot and TPM do offer tangible security benefits and is security features you can take ownership of.

Secure Boot allows your own key hierarchy, and TPM allows you to take ownership.

The linked boot disk isn't really proof that Secure Boot is useless. If you don't set a MOKManager password (as you should), and you change the security state of the machine while present at the keyboard. Yes you can boot things.

This is intended to make sure people can actually decide to trust things. And having insecure defaults makes this less useful. Not very surprising.

TPMs could also prevent attacks like this on your machine.

Incidentally I've invested quite a bit of time in making user-friendly Secure Boot tooling as well. https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl

No problem! The sbctl package ships with a pretty extensive hook out of the box (https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/blob/master/contrib/pacman/ZZ-sbctl.hook). It's been very reliable for automatically resigning .efi executables after updates for me.

sbctl verify returns failed to find EFI system partition despite it definitely is there. It's the same issue as this but remounting or restarting doesn't fix it.

lol

Must actually prevent unsigned images from booting

sudo dnf install asciidoc golang -y VERSION=0.11 cd /tmp curl -L "https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/releases/download/${VERSION}/sbctl-${VERSION}.tar.gz" | tar zxvf - cd "sbctl-${VERSION}" make sudo make install cd ~

By far the easiest is to use sbctl to generate, install and use keys to sign your efi images. You can use mkinitcpio to build the unified kernels automatically and a pacman trigger to rerun the sbctl signing when the kernel is updated. Pretty straightforward (once you've done it once).

The question is whether you have any UEFI drivers or not. If they're in the ESP you can just look there to check, but UEFI drivers can also be loaded from PCI cards or baked in the firmware itself.

If you're using a TPM for Secure Boot, you can use the command in https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/wiki/FAQ#option-rom to know for sure.

See also https://github.com/bkw777/mainline which offers a UI to install the mainline kernels from mainline kernels PPA.

You are referring to this, right? https://github.com/bkw777/mainline

use the Mainline Tool to install the latest kernel: https://github.com/bkw777/mainline

on Ubuntu or derivates of it like Linux Mint just use https://github.com/bkw777/mainline which pulls newer updates automatically

Lastly, of you want to play with kernels, install mainline.....https://github.com/bkw777/mainline

On Mint 21? I don't think so. The only possible way would be to install Mint 20.3 which comes with the older Cinnamon before the Mutter rebase. You could then install a newer kernel like 6.3 using Mainline, but you would be stuck with an Ubuntu 20.04 base which means much older apps in the repositories.

Out of the box Ubuntu and derivatives (and also Debian upstream of Ubuntu) are probably shipping with older kernels. Normally I'd just suggest installing the GUI kernel version management tool mainline (IIRC mainline should just be available in the Ubuntu software center) and just installing a more recent kernel to get support. Though you indicated you didn't want to touch the command line, it is also very possible to load drivers that are not shipped with the kernel if someone were willing to do so.