Thank you for reply.

It has been my pleasure! Thank you for replying back :) .

Yes, I would be ok with A as well, but I am learning things slowly to get to that point.

While I absolutely respect that attitude, it’s worth noting that literally none of the hardened and respected distros are a one-man show. Which is my way of saying that unless you pursuit a career in cyber security, you’re probably better served elsewhere.

So B for now would be great.

Aight. Excellent.

But it seems like OpenBSD might not be great for running VMs

IIRC, it depends. If a TTY/terminal-interface is all you need, then vmm handles that pretty well. But if you’d like to run applications that have their own graphical interfaces, then OpenBSD’s solution might not be adequate. At least, it wasn’t the last time I did a thorough check on the distro.

Could not find much info for virtualization support on HardenedBSD though. Not sure how well bhyve work there, but it seems like VMs might not work well or be performant enough on either of them.

IIRC, bhyve is pretty good actually. Performance-wise, it is good enough to do gaming even. As HardenedBSD is simply hardened FreeBSD, I don’t have a serious reason to assume it ain’t able to do that.

On that note, I want to mention quBSD as an interesting project. It kinda aims to bridge the gap between Qubes OS and FreeBSD. Its developer hasn’t released anything yet, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

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Having said all of that, I want to state clearly that there is a disconnect between what’s out there and what you want:

• Alpine is pretty decent security-wise, but -like literally most other distros out there- security is somewhat of an afterthought. Like, unless it is a platform-wide accepted ordeal, it will not consider pro-active hardening. This also more-or-less applies to the likes of Artix, Gentoo and Void. So, it relies on your expertise for serious hardening.
• OpenBSD’s vmm doesn’t do GUIs.
• Kicksecure and secureblue while being Linux’ finest security-wise, do rely on systemd. Same applies to NixOS derivatives like SécurixOS and Spectrum OS.
• HardenedBSD. Which, actually looks pretty fabulous otherwise, may not support flatpak. Don’t quote me on this, though*.
• Qubes OS’ system requirements are too high, as you point out elsewhere.

So…, what does that leave us with :P ?

Is an amalgamation between sixos and nix-mineral in which you try to port all systemd-related hardenings the best we can do?

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However, I’d argue that a possible eventuality might yield us an actual winner.

Recently, Flatpak’s maintainers/developers noted work on Flatpak Next; a successor to Flatpak, if you will. The hope is that it’ll eliminate some of Flatpak’s glaring issues. However, they also announced that it will depend on systemd.

Granted, the eventual thing we’ll receive might not depend on systemd at all. Heck, even if it will, perhaps some distro maintainers will provide a workaround OR just keep on relying on the old flatpak that might get new maintainers. So, there’s absolutely no reason to go full-on FUD right now.

Yet, an out does exist that doesn’t depend on anything of the above; simply by not requiring flatpak support. In which case, HardenedBSD it is. FWIW, with access to VMs, you can also continue to enjoy your flatpaks through a VM. Which, literally happens to be the simplest fix to salvage an “almost”.

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P.S. if you didn’t figure it out yet, your query is something I asked myself a couple of years ago 😅.

P.P.S. I forgot about Chimera Linux. I’m not well-versed into it, but perhaps another interesting one to consider. At least alongside Alpine, Artix, Gentoo and Void.