Firejailing Steam

firejail is an application sandbox that uses technologies I don't understand to make using my computer more difficult. It also provides a basic security sandbox and helps protect me from malicious applications.

Remember that by default Linux is rather secure, but depending on the user's needs there may be situations where more fine grained control is desired. Firejail allows a novice user (like myself) to apply all of these existing security technologies already built into the kernel to give them a safety net should an application go rogue. It does so via profiles, which control how much - or how little - additional securities should be applied to an application.

There is a steam.profile, which ships with the firejail application as a supported profile. For 90% of games, this profile works fine, but there is a single instance that I have observed so far where applying this steam.profile crashed the game. The game in question, is Unturned.

I am not placing blame on either developer here, I am just stating what I noticed and what worked for me.

Unturned crashes for whatever reason when the default steam.profile is applied via firejail. The crash can be worked around by ignoring the protocol line in the steam.profile file, which limits the application to using only the Unix socket protocol, and IPv4 IPv6 protocols. Unturned apparently needs something more, and even adding all of the protocols available into the steam.profile did not fix the crash. But, by ignoring the protocol line by passing the --ignore option when running firejail, Unturned launches fine. Beautiful.

$ firejail --ignore=protocol steam 

Go grow a tomato farm and kill some zombers you. It's free.
On an unrelated Linux steam note, the microphone in CS:GO just does not work. The game also hard crashes if you try to load a map using changelevel <map> instead of map <map> in the console. Valve plz fix.

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