This seems to be a misunderstanding resulting from paraphrasing.
The statement “hardened_malloc hardly works with anything” was not made. That appears to be your interpretation or summary, not a direct quote. Please avoid presenting paraphrased interpretations as direct quotes.
No such claim was made. Kindly verify whether a statement was actually made before refuting a position that may not have been taken. This helps avoid constructing strawman arguments.
It may seem unclear when two sentences are quoted in isolation without considering the full context and supporting explanations.
At this point, Kicksecure (and Whonix) runs primarily inside VMs. GNOME and KDE are unsuitable for Kicksecure.
- GNOME due to security and privacy concerns elaborated on Dev/GNOME.
- In the past KDE was Whonix’s default desktop environment but then ported to Xfce due to performance issues. See also Dev/KDE.
That cannot possibly be a justification to stick to XFCE.
Version 18 has been ported to LXQt.
I don’t remember what the issue was at the time. The original rationale was written in February 2024. Hence, the following has now been added for clarity:
- Update November 2025: The original issue can no longer be identified, possibly due to Upstream Deleting Posts. It may have been similar to Build issue on Rocky Linux 9 aarch64 #228, a compilation issue that might have been resolvable in theory, but Kicksecure lacked the resources to maintain a fix at the time this was written. As of February 2024, HM offered no direct support for Debian. Pull request Debian packaging work in progress #90 received no feedback and was locked without explanation. This is entirely within the rights of the HM project, which has no obligation to support other Linux distributions. However, it is relevant context and has contributed to the deprecation of HM in Kicksecure, and is therefore included here.
What specifically is misleading?
Kicksecure 18 was ported to Wayland.
- Non-Qubes only
- Qubes: see Qubes ticket