I’ve been 100% on Linux for several years now and I don’t miss Windows at all in any aspect.
But in my opinion, there is one thing that Windows does significantly better than Linux, kiosk mode.
I wish Linux had something similar. All the solutions I’ve been able to find are far more complex and technical to implement and use.
If anybody has suggestions for something that’s easy to use on Linux that works similar to Windows kiosk mode, I’d love to try it.
In what way does Windows fulfill a ‘kiosk’ display mode better than Linux for you? Are you looking for permanent installations or just temporary lockdown to a single application. One of the more modern and straightforward methods currently is using cage.
Cage lets you spawn a Wayland compositor from command-line (or via system service, obviously) that launches either a singular or multiple exclusively-fullscreen applications.
Permanent kiosk is the use case I am looking for. I am aware of cage, it looks pretty interesting and I am planning on trying it sometime soon.
I should clarify, I don’t think that Windows kiosks are better than Linux kiosks in their general functions, I would say Linux kiosks take that crown too.
I’m referring specifically to the ease of setup in Windows vs Linux. With Windows, I can convert any machine to a kiosk in less than 5 minutes. No scripting, no changes to login credentials or permissions, no extra packages installed.
I just wish Linux had something that easy. I would even be happy if it was tied to a specific distro or desktop environment, like a special mode in Plasma or Cinnamon.
For the most part, you won’t be able to escape Unix-like paradigms when using Unix-like systems. Notably, users have to exist in some form. You don’t necessarily need to give them passwords for the frontend signage, but they need to exist. The shortlist of setting up cage would be:
- install your favorite server distro of choice
- Have a rootless, sudoless user available to use
- install cage and your app(s) of choice
- Add autologin for the user and edit the user’s BASH profile to autolaunch cage
- Attend to any other backend setup (remote access, only allowing tty1 to exist, etc.)
- reboot
It’s not quite a few clicks, but this can in contrast also be fully automated trivially if it’s something you need to setup more than once.
Not an expert by any means (actually just learning ostree now), but would it maybe make sense to use an immutable distro like Fedora Silverblue? That way people pretty much can’t change anything in root (well unless they’re hackerman or whatever)?
It’s been years since I took a look at this but I vaguely remember a handy kioskrc config file under xfce4…
KDE Plasma desktop and apps also have a Kiosk mode/framework for deployment and lockdown built-in, that can come in handy
Kiosk - Simple configuration management for large deployment
The Kiosk framework provides a set of features that makes it possible to easily and powerfully restrict the capabilities of a KDE environment.
Introduction
The Kiosk framework provides a set of features that makes it possible to easily and powerfully restrict the capabilities of a KDE environment based on user and group credentials. In addition to an introductory overview, this article covers configuration setting lock down, action and resource restrictions, assigning profiles to users and groups and more.
