This might be an 'ignant question, but does anyone successfully use Zoom on their L14’s with PureOS? I enrolled in a class that is over Zoom and I wanted to use my L14, but wasn’t sure how compatible it was.
Second question: even if I can functionally put Zoom on the L14, would it be a fools errand to give Mircosoft a trojan horse into my computer when the entire point of getting the Librem was to get away from big tech? (I don’t know anything about how the guts of Zoom operates, but I assume the worst). Obviously, the class is already set so they aren’t going to switch to a FLOSS program just for me. Just looking for options here.
I have kept the old HP Desktop as my fallback for these situations if putting Zoom on the L14 is self defeating.
You are absolutely right. For this reason, I’m using Zoom in a virtual machine on Qubes OS, which by the way works fine on Librem 14. Also, it’s not Microsoft but China.
i have successfully used zoom from flathub. in theory this provides some protection, as it runs without access to the full file system and the process id namespace, etc. however, i use x11 and zoom has a lot of access to the x11 protocol, so probably there is a hole in there somewhere. furthermore, i don’t get the impression that flathub has a crack security team. not saying they are bad at it, but i don’t get the impression of lots of vigilance and organizational strength, e.g., i have more confidence in debian’s security team.
Thank you everyone for these responses. They have been very educational to read even though most are more technical than I can really understand.
In light of this, I have concluded that the old HP Desktop is probably going to be my best bet for this situation.
This might even be better too. This way my trackable digital footprint still exists in some capacity. Perhaps it will be a useful decoy. It might have aroused suspicions from “them” if my digital presence disappeared completely. They might send someone in to investigate.
Zoom worked fine on Pure OS including desktop sharing in X11 and Wayland. For privacy focused individuals I recommend to avoid closed source code, including Zoom and Teams because you don’t know what it actually does on top of official features.
I, too, use zoom and Google meet in X11 mode only. Wayland doesn’t work for screen sharing for me. I even can’t record the screen using OBS studio in Wayland; thus use X11 for that also. By the way, we can’t use Librem 14 because of its huge noise in the background to other people on the call with us. I use a workaround to use the laptop for screen sharing and the phone for speaking in the same meeting…
I don’t remember the details but I had to edit some files in text editor to make it work. I have abandoned even that, because I became more privacy focused. Now I use Qubes OS and all closed source apps are in Windows AppVM. Sorry I can’t be more of help.
