ego (a.k.a Alter Ego)

Do all your games need access to your documents, browser history, SSH private keys?

... No? Just run ego steam!

Ego is a tool to run Linux desktop applications under a different local user. Currently integrates with Wayland, Xorg, PulseAudio and xdg-desktop-portal. You may think of it as xhost for Wayland and PulseAudio. This is done using filesystem ACLs and xhost command.

Work in progress. :)

Disclaimer: DO NOT RUN UNTRUSTED PROGRAMS VIA EGO. However, using ego is more secure than running applications directly under your primary user.

Installation

The goal of ego is to come with sane defaults and be as easy as possible to set up.

1. Make sure you have Rust installed and run:

   cargo install ego sudo cp ~/.cargo/bin/ego /usr/local/bin/

2. Create local user named "ego": ^[1]

   sudo useradd ego --uid 155 --create-home

3. That's all, try it:

   ego --machinectl xdg-open .

[1] No extra groups are needed by the ego user. UID below 1000 hides this user on the login screen.

Avoid password prompt

If using "machinectl" mode, you need the rather new systemd version >=247 and polkit >=0.106 to do this securely.

Create file /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/50-ego-machinectl.rules, polkit will automatically load it (replace <myname> with your own username):

js polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) { if (action.id == "org.freedesktop.machine1.host-shell" && action.lookup("user") == "ego" && subject.user == "<myname>") { return polkit.Result.YES; } });

sudo mode

For sudo, add the following to /etc/sudoers (replace <myname> with your own username):

<myname> ALL=(ego) NOPASSWD:ALL

Changelog

0.4.1 (2021-01-29)

• Fixed --machinectl on Ubuntu, Debian with dash shell (#42)
• Fixed error reporting when command execution fails (#43)
• Documented how to avoid password prompt with machinectl & other doc tweaks (#41)

0.4.0 (2021-01-29)

• Improved integration with desktop environments:
  • Launch xdg-desktop-portal-gtk in machinectl session (#6, #31)
  • Old behavior is still available via --machinectl-bare switch.
• Shell completion files are now auto-generated with clap-generate 3.0.0-beta.2 (#36, #28)
  • bash, zsh and fish shells are supported out of the box.
• Code reorganization and CI improvements (#21, #23)
• Dependency updates (#20, #24, #27, #22, #26, #33, #35, #38, #37, #39)

0.3.1 (2020-03-17)

• Improved error message for missing target user (#16)

0.3.0 (2020-03-02)

• Initial machinectl support (using --machinectl) (#8)
• Updated: posix-acl (#9)

0.2.0 (2020-02-17)

• Added zsh completion support (#5)
• Added --verbose flag (#4)
• Added --user argument and command-line parsing (#3)

0.1.0 (2020-02-13)

Initial version

Appendix

Ego is licensed under the MIT License (see the LICENSE file). Ego was created by Marti Raudsepp. Ego's primary website is at https://github.com/intgr/ego

Thanks to Alexander Payne (myrrlyn) for relinquishing the unused "ego" crate name.