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 X11 host access control.

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

Distro packages

Distribution packages are available for:

• Arch Linux (user-contributed package) https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ego/

After installing the package, add yourself to the ego-users group. After logout and login, the ego command should just work.

(varia/README.md documents recommendations for distro packagers)

Manual setup

Ego aims to come with sane defaults and be easy to set up.

Requirements:

• Rust & cargo
• libacl.so library (Debian/Ubuntu: libacl1-dev; Fedora: libacl-devel; Arch: acl)
• libxcb.so library (Debian/Ubuntu: libxcb1-dev; Fedora: libxcb-devel; Arch: libxcb)

Recommended: (Not needed when using --sudo mode, but some desktop functionality may not work).

• machinectl command (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora: systemd-container; Arch: systemd)
• xdg-desktop-portal-gtk (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch: xdg-desktop-portal-gtk)

Installation:

1. 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 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 (default if available), 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):

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

Unreleased

• Use X11 protocol directly via libxcb. The xhost dependency is no longer needed. (#163)

1.1.7 (2023-06-26)

• Distro packaging: added tmpfiles.d conf to create missing ego user home directory (#134, fixed issue #131)
• Ego now detects and warns when target user's home directory does not exist or has wrong ownership (#139)
• Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV) is now 1.64.0 (#116)
• Various minor cleanups, replaced unmaintained dependencies, dependency updates.

1.1.6 (2023-01-21)

• Updated to clap 4.0.x (#101) and many other dependency updates
• Fixes for new clippy lints (#95, #93, #111)
• Use snapbox instead of hand-coded snapshot testing (#102)
• Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV) was determined to be 1.60.0 (#113)

1.1.5 (2022-01-02)

• Document xhost requirement, improve xhost error reporting (#76)
• Upgrade to clap 3.0.0 stable (#71)

(Version 1.1.4 was yanked, it was accidentally released with a regression)

1.1.3 (2021-11-12)

• Pin clap version (fixes #65) (#68)

1.1.2 (2021-05-08)

• Enable sudo askpass helper if SUDO_ASKPASS is set (#58)
  • Example how to set up a GUI password prompt with sudo: https://askubuntu.com/a/314401
  • Note: For a GUI password prompt with the machinectl mode, you need to run a Polkit authentication agent instead

1.1.1 (2021-03-23)

• Include drop-in files for polkit, sudoers.d, sysusers.d -- for distro packages (#53)
• Documentation tweaks (#51, #53)

1.1.0 (2021-03-07)

• Default to machinectl if available, fall back to sudo otherwise (#47)
• Documentation & minor improvements (#46, #48)

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.