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What worries me is : can a bad actor reproduce whatever bug was corrupting SteamOS, and publish games on the storefront with the sole intent to mess with people?
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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I hope it’s a case of the writer glossing over details, like it corrupts its own files in a way Steam can’t understand or recover.
The implication that a malicious app can break the whole OS is scary.
The main thing that a bad actor would gain is "being kicked off of the steam store". The bigger threat would be if Gabe figures out which is the bad actor's main account. Losing all their games would be pretty big blowback for such an attacker.
I really hope we get more details, how can a user space application brick an immutable OS? That's crazy.
The system itself is immutable, but the configuration and data isn't. If it crashes the Steam UI by some kind of data corruption issue that isn't handled well, you can still end up with a malfunctioning device. Reinstalling the OS probably isn't necessary, but it's a lot easier than flashing Linux to a boot drive and manually browsing through the files to get rid of the broken entry.
Ah.. so I guess the gamescope session would fail bc steam fails, and leave the user no way to change to desktop/plasma session. And yeah, steam configs would be accessible in user space as it's not system level. Yikes all around.
The problem is that SteamOS doesn't have a whole lot of boot options besides "start up directly into Game Mode successfully". If Steam chokes while ingesting any of its config or any metadata in your library, that's the end of it. You can hold a button to wipe everything (the Playstation solution), or you can figure out how to boot a live-iso and fix "the problem". Not everybody has the skills to fix stuff in Linux, heck not everybody has the ability to "boot up from a usb stick and have a working keyboard, using only one USB hole".
Would be interesting to know what actually happens.
This is like crowdstrike all over again
I heard Southwest Airlines is migrating from Windows 3.1 to Steam Decks.